Tag: #AltTech

Social media and the threat to the status quo

I don’t think it is a coincidence that we’re seeing a growing push against social media from the Left, as it has largely ceased to serve their social justice purposes and has now been transformed into a sword that cuts both ways:

We are learning that all of our thoughts aren’t welcome, especially by social media company investors. We are also learning that social media companies are a business. This means conversation is encouraged as long as it runs the gamut from mundane to vicious but stops at the overtly sexual or violent. Early in its life-cycle Pinterest made a big stink about actively banning porn while Instagram essentially allowed all sorts of exposition as long as it was monetizable and censored. Facebook still actively polices its photographs for even the hint of sexuality as an artist named Justyna Kiesielewicz recently discovered. She posted a staid nude and wanted to run it as an targeted advertisement. Facebook mistakenly ran the ad for a while, grabbing $50 before it banned the image. In short the latest incarnation of the expository impulse is truncated and sites like Facebook and Twitter welcome most hate groups but most draw the line at underboobs.

Further, social media is no longer protected. As careless CEOs quickly discover saying the wrong thing in a “private” chat or deleting an errant tweet does not mean someone won’t screencapture your rant. In fact social media has become an id and ego collector, a fly strip where all of our worst thoughts are captured permanently. We exhale in anger and chuff in frustration. We tell people to unfollow us if they don’t like what we’re saying and we turn neighborhood pages into political cesspools. Then, when we cross too many perceived boundaries, an army of trolls is ready to pounce and our private spaces become public very quickly.

In short social media is no longer a safe place. I don’t mean this in the politically correct sense but in the very mental and physical sense. Whereas the web was once a broadcast medium it is now a two-way or many-to-many medium. Our errant Twitter thoughts can make us targets and we often don’t know we’re being watched. Entire wars can break out online that have real-world consequences – see Pizzagate – and hoaxes flit through the memetic bloodstream like cancer, breaking down our defenses. A prominent writer and friend recently mused about what would happen if he posted some political rants. The first thing that leapt to his readers’ minds was the potential for SWATing and doxing and then an visit from the FBI. Then, as evidenced by the above CEO example, you get fired.

Social media has become a very real, very visceral, and very censorial force and it can now only worsen the human condition. It was once an experiment but that experiment is over.

That being said, this is a genie who won’t be easily put back in the bottle, because it still serves too many powerful and vested interests. What we can expect is what we are starting to see; a one-sided crackdown that will ultimately fail because it necessarily sacrifices the moral level of war, and in its hypocrisy, gives up both the moral and intellectual high grounds.

The intrinsic problem that the Left faces is that in its constant attempts to destroy every Right-wing figure who surfaces, those who survive become impervious to their methods and become examples to others. Observers then learn what approaches work, such as the open antifragility pioneered by the likes of MILO and Stefan Molyneux, and which ones don’t, such as the aggressive anonymity that is easily neutered by a simple doxxing.

The Left can’t win on an equal playing field, so they have fought dirty for nearly a century. That was effective so long as the Right was the establishment and sensitive to accusations of fairness and violating its own standards. But now the Alt-Right is rising, and has demonstrated that it is capable of winning on an equal playing field or tilting the field, as needed. This is why their attempts to discredit, disqualify, and destroy will be more furious than ever, and why antifragility and reliable allies rather than anonymity are necessary for every Alt-Right and Alt-Lite figure, however minor.

Mailvox: the slow death of Mozilla

Brendan Eich is going to outlast the company that pushed him out.

Got
an email at work today saying that Arena the software we use for
document tracking is no longer supporting Firefox going forward due to a
lack of use by users. So it would seem the terminal deathside is beginning in earnest. 

No doubt it will be particularly satisfying for Mr. Eich when companies like this start adopting Brave as their browser of choice. 

A more accurate knowledge core

We’ve added some important features to Infogalactic. First, you’ve probably noticed that it’s running considerably faster. While it’s still not quite as fast as Wikipedia, we’re obtaining our speed through significantly improved database efficiency rather than through gargantuan and expensive caching. Believe it or not, we’re actually using slightly fewer server-side resources than we were when it was running much more slowly. We’ll continue to add additional improvements, but they’ll tend to be more marginal as we’ve already addressed the biggest bottlenecks.

Second, dynamic forking is now operative in a limited capacity. We’re not turning anything on yet, but within a month or so, we’ll be keeping constantly up-to-date with Wikipedia on pages the Galaxians haven’t touched, and on pages that have been edited, manual dynamic forking will be at the disposal of certain active editors.

Third, we now have sidebar banners operative. Some of them may amuse you. Castalia authors should be sure to get their Infogalactic pages up now, as they will be provided with free sidebar banners for the books they publish with us.

And finally, another example of how Infogalactic is fundamentally more accurate than Wikipedia due to the latter’s insistence on unreliable Reliable Sources.

Robert Heinlein on Wikipedia

Heinlein became one of the first science-fiction writers to break into mainstream magazines such as The Saturday Evening Post in the late 1940s. He was one of the best-selling science-fiction novelists for many decades, and he, Isaac Asimov, and Arthur C. Clarke are often considered the “Big Three” of science fiction authors.[5][6]

Robert Heinlein on Infogalactic


He was one of the first science fiction writers to break into mainstream magazines such as The Saturday Evening Post in the late 1940s. He was one of the best-selling science fiction novelists for many decades, and he, Isaac Asimov, and Arthur C. Clarke are often erroneously considered to be the “Big Three” of science fiction authors.[5][6]. The original “Big Three” were actually Heinlein, Asimov, and A.E. van Vogt.[7]

This is what winning the cultural war looks like. Getting the facts straight one at a time.

I disavow Gab

As I am reliably informed that it is chock full of notorious white supremacists. And I can’t be associated with anyone of whom Vox.com does not approve. I mean, it’s VOX.COM!

Prominent feminist and author Lindy West deactivated her Twitter account this week, and she was blunt about why: The social media platform, she alleged in an essay published by the Guardian, has refused to curb harassment carried out by members of the white nationalist, misogynist alt-right movement, thereby contributing to a global political crisis….

Ironically, Twitter’s November launch of anti-harassment tools and concurrent banning of many alt-right accounts inspired many alt-right Twitter users to leave the site for the white supremacist-friendly, “free speech”–touting social network Gab.

Gab’s logo is an easily identifiable likeness of Pepe the Frog, an image explicitly associated with white supremacy, and Gab’s verified users include known white supremacists. But a Gab spokesperson has stated emphatically to Vox.com that the platform is “not an alt-right or anti-semitic site” and that it “[does] not represent any one particular political ideology or movement.” The same spokesperson also insisted that Gab’s logo is not Pepe the Frog, but rather “drawn from antediluvian and Biblical sources,” and stated that Gab “rejects the notion that we represent ‘white supremacy’ in any shape or form.”

Be that as it may, white supremacists are blatantly flocking to Gab — Heimbach even promoted the site to the Washington Post after he was banned from Twitter on January 3. In essence, though Twitter has attempted to follow the letter rather than the spirit of its harassment policy, even its cursory efforts have made it unpopular with the very users who are driving progressive voices like West away from the platform.

This mass exodus of hateful trolls may sound like a win for those who are still using Twitter — but many people have already given up waiting for the site to change, and progressive “why I left Twitter” pieces like West’s are becoming increasingly frequent.

You have to enjoy the total incoherency of this article.

  1. Twitter is full of Nazis and white supremacists.
  2. Eradicating Nazis should be Twitter’s primary, secondary, and tertiary priority, according to “prominent feminist and author”.
  3. Twitter has set up a Trust & Safety Council to harass, suspend, and ban everyone who tweets anything even remotely right-wing. Seriously, they will suspend your account for nothing more than linking to this blog. (NB: none of my Twitter accounts are suspended, I just don’t use it anymore.)
  4. The Alt-Right and tens of thousands of conservatives have largely abandoned Twitter for Gab in a mass exodus; another 30,000 joined yesterday.
  5. But this abandonment of Twitter isn’t enough for many progressives, who have left Twitter as well in response.
  6. Because Nazis. Or something.

Of course, as we all know, the real reason those progressives are leaving is that they can’t play the victim and get the attention they are seeking in an SJW echo chamber, as there is nothing left for them to do but play the game of oneupvictimship and see who can out-virtue signal and out-hoax the other. That is why some of the very progressives who have been most publicly whining about Nazis and white supremacists on Twitter are now clamoring to join Gab.

Also, since when did “prominent” become a synonym for “obese”? I like it though. It’s usefully subtle. “Have you SEEN Lindy?” “Yeah, she’s increasingly prominent these days.”

Of course, what is particularly interesting about this article is this little note: Updated by Aja Romano@ajaromano Jan 6, 2017, 1:10pm EST. You see, the original article said “Gab’s verified users include notorious white supremacists like Vox Day”, which is both false and defamatory, as I am not a white supremacist, much less a notorious one, despite the efforts of Jeet Heer and Olivia Nuzzi to create that false Narrative.

It would appear the lesson of Gawker is beginning to percolate through the SJW media. What a shame it did not register with Amazing Stories or Foz Meadows.

An unamenable authority

Notice how Apple attempts to utilize its position as a market gatekeeper to force other companies, such as Gab, to jump through various hoops, and potentially, even converge itself, in order to access the customers Apple controls.

An abbreviated summary of Gab’s travails, as described by Andrew Torba:

They want us to include our guidelines in the app and update guidelines to include the NSFW language. It’s absolutely beyond ridiculous the hoops they are forcing us through. Every rejection has more requirements. We will get there. Or we will raise hell about it.

Folks this is what we got back from Apple. Every time we fix what they want, they magically come up with new requirements. It’s absolutely disgusting. They want us banning people. They want us to add blocking. They want us removing content within 24 hours. This is insane.

Folks we are pushing back on Apple bigly.

  • We have feed filters. 
  • We have user muting. 
  • We have the ability to flag content.

There is absolutely no way this app should not be approved. Submitting an appeal, then raising hell on this issue in a very public way. Apple wants to play? We will play.

Here is our reply to Apple folks.
-We have feed filters.
-We have muting.
-We have flagging for illegal content.
-We review flagged content and can address it quickly if it breaks the law/guidelines.
-We can certainly show examples of “objectionable content” on any other social platform.

Now, as anyone who has been on Twitter or Wikipedia knows, there is a considerable amount of NSFW content, none of which is marked as such. But it’s pointless to try to base an argument on this obvious double standard, because SJW-converged corporations are shamelessly hypocritical and they don’t hesitate to play ideological favorites.

Just as a right-wing employee will be fired over the smallest perceived infraction that doesn’t even violate company policy while an SJW employee can violate multiple company policies at will without suffering any consequences, every Alt-Tech organization will be, to at least some extent, obstructed and frozen out by the SJW-converged tech giants.

That’s to be expected. The problem will get worse before it gets better, but it is only a problem in the short run, because whether the Alt-Tech organization runs the gauntlet, as Gab has, or elects to simply ignore it, as Infogalactic has to date, the experience will only make the Alt-Tech stronger and more disruptive.

The hate-filled echo chamber

It’s fascinating, is it not, how the media and the SJWs – but I repeat myself – try to simultaneously dismiss the Alt-Tech alternatives as hate-filled echo chambers of racism and conspiracy theories while simultaneously celebrating the banishment of everyone who doesn’t submit to the Narrative enforced by the SJW thought police on Big Social Media. Of course, if they could successfully connect consequences to actions, they wouldn’t be SJWs.

A Guardian rabbit cautiously ventures, undercover, into the terrible dark abyss of GAB:

In the wake of Donald Trump’s presidential victory, it was said that Twitter had helped swing the election for the property developer, reality TV star and insatiable tweeter. But some of his more high-profile supporters on the so-called “alt-right” who have had their Twitter accounts suspended are abandoning the platform in favour of a new social network called Gab.

The self-styled cult iconoclast Milo Yiannopoulos of Breitbart has apparently joined the likes of Trump attack-dog Ann Coulter and the excitable Alex Jones of Infowars in signing up with Gab. There is even a parody RealPresidentTrump account that for a short while presented itself – all too convincingly – as the real thing.

And recently the white nationalist leader Richard B Spencer went so far as to claim that Twitter had sent “execution squads across the alt-right” to purge users with far-right views. He predicted that Gab would be “the place where we go next”.

The brainchild of its 25-year-old Christian conservative founder, Andrew Torba, Gab promises to guarantee free speech, no matter how offensive. It is currently in the early “beta” stage of development and there is an extensive waiting list to join. When I applied, wanting to take a look at the site, I was told there were more than 400,000 applicants in front of me, and was advised that it could take a week before I was allowed on.

Instead I used the login of a colleague in America and spent 48 hours in a strange world of Trump worship, white nationalism, racism, conspiracy theory, gun idolatry and crass humour, all of it delivered with the righteous conviction of total certainty. The effect is a little like viewing the world through a circus mirror while being constantly told that this is what reality looks like….

Twitter and Facebook are commercial enterprises that advertise themselves as neutral places of communication, which inevitably brings complications. Some of the fake news that Facebook promoted during the election is thought to have helped the Trump campaign. And Twitter, which has been used to circulate Holocaust denial and other scandalous nonsense, is slowly coming round to a more interventionist monitoring of content.

They’re like bossy little children who can’t bear to be left alone.

“We don’t want you here! Go away! You are banished from our tree house!”

“Um, okay. Later.” (goes and builds own tree house)

“Hey, hey, hey, can we come in? Why won’t you let us in?” (secretly climbs tree)  “Hey, hey, you’re not doing it right! This tree house sucks! Why can’t we play here? I know, let’s vote on some new rules about what everyone can do!”

Never think, for one single moment, that SJWs won’t invade Gab, Infogalactic, and every other successful Alt-Tech site and attempt to take them over. It won’t work, of course, but don’t think they will simply leave them alone.

They also appear to have conveniently forgotten, already, that it is the circus mirror people who are in possession of the reliable predictive model. As Aristotle wrote, some people simply cannot be educated by mere information.

Initial speedups

Some recent posts at Gab concerning Infogalactic:

  • The daily traffic at #Infogalactic is steadily growing. 
    • +34.4 % October to November 
    • +43.5% November to December 
  • Jimmy e-mailed me many times pleading for me to donate again to Wiki. Wiki is compromised, infiltrated by underemployed SJWs w/ too much free time. Wiki is losing a donor. Out with Wiki. In with Infogalactic. Migrate over if you’re right of Karl Marx.

If you’re using Infogalactic to replace Wikipedia – which you can now do as your default search engine in Brave, or by typing :i in the URL bar – you’ve probably noticed that it is considerably faster than it was a week ago. Click a few times on the Random Page link to see the initial improvements in page load times.

We’re still working on the Search and Image Fetch database functions; the latter is the primary culprit with regards to the persistent slowness of both, but we have made considerable progress there as well and expect to have those speedups implemented within a week. I’ll be sending out an update to both the Burn Unit and the Phase Two donors with an explanation of what IG’s Techstars have done, what they are doing, and what they’ll be working on next, as soon as this first round of speedups are in place. Please note that as a general rule, I try to avoid unnecessary communiques that contain no actual information.

If you haven’t joined the Burn Unit or jumped the donor ship from Wiki to IG yet, I would encourage you to do so now for two reasons. First, the Alt-Tech revolution is the only way out of being permanently walled in by the converged technology giants, and second, the planetary knowledge core is only going to keep getting better from here.

As you may have heard, Apple is still playing politics with Gab, attempting to keep the Gab app out of the Apple Store on spurious and hypocritical grounds, and Twitter has banned API-related access by Gab, which tells you that Big Tech is already alarmed by the rapid rise of the Alt-Tech. We not only can win, we will win, but we do need those who are on our side to support us rather than continue to support those who hate them.

Encouraging the others

Sorry, Jack, no seat for you at the table:

As we reported earlier, Trump sat down with top tech executives, including several of his sharpest critics, to mend fences after a divisive election in which virtually all of Silicon Valley backed Hillary Clinton. Trump was heading into hostile territory – with the exception of PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel, Silicon Valley shunned the New York billionaire during the presidential campaign, throwing their weight behind his Democratic rival Clinton.

The tech talks, convened by Trump, bought together numerous CEOs such as Tim Cook of Apple, Satya Nadella of Microsoft, Larry Page of Alphabet (Google) and Brian Krzanich of Intel, among others. In addition to Trump nemesis Jeff Bezos, also on the guest list are Tesla and SpaceX founder Elon Musk, Facebook’s chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg and Oracle chief executive Safra Catz.

We now know the answer why Dorsey was MIA: according to Politico, Twitter was told it was “bounced” from Wednesday’s meeting between tech executives and President-elect Donald Trump in retribution for refusing during the campaign to allow an emoji version of the hashtag #CrookedHillary, according to a source close to the situation.

Play fair or be frozen out. The God-Emperor hasn’t even Ascended yet and he’s already laying down the law. It’s going to be interesting to see how the Trump administration wields the IRS once it assumes control.

And, in the meantime:

Officials at FBI headquarters instructed its New York field office to continue its corruption investigation into the Clinton Foundation following the election of Republican candidate Donald Trump, according to a former senior law enforcement official.

The instructions ordered agents to “go forward” with their ongoing inquiry into the Clinton Foundation which is focusing on issues of corruption and money laundering, according to the source.

“There were no instructions to shut it down, to discontinue or to stand down on the investigation, but to continue its work,” the former official told the Daily Caller News Foundation in an interview.

Gab goes big

Fantastic to see Gab making the Drudge Report… even if the Yahoo article linked consisted of little more than the usual anti-Alt-Right nonsense.

Squeezed out of Twitter and other social media websites cracking down on hate speech, far-right activists are finding a home on a new platform that promises never to censor content.

Launched in August, Gab has become known as a safe haven for the “alt-right” movement dominated by the white supremacists who are helping fuel America’s deepening polarization.

The social network currently has 100,000 members and another 200,000 on its waiting list, according to the company.

“All are welcome to speak freely,” spokesman Utsav Sanduja says.

Gab is unable to accommodate all those who want to join, he adds, because it is still in its test phase.

The social network’s rise comes amid Twitter’s suspension of political activists for purportedly promoting racist and harassing comments.

One of the new “Gabbers,” Richard Spencer, heads the white supremacist National Policy Institute, whose account Twitter has suspended.

Spencer, whose “Hail Trump” comments were seen as evocative of the Nazi era, joined the Twitter exile along with Milo Yiannopoulos, accused of fomenting a social media campaign against the African-American actress Leslie Jones.

Sadly for the SJW Narrative, Richard Spencer’s account on Twitter was restored to normal status yesterday, because it was finally determined that he didn’t do anything to violate their increasingly Byzantine rules.

Make a note, Facebook. Yahoo is Fake News.

Note that I’m not active on Twitter any more by choice. I’m neither suspended nor banned, I’ve simply decided to stop utilizing a social media site that blocks access to this blog. If you want to follow me on social media, you’ll have to join the Alt-Tech revolution and get on Gab.