Tag: #AltTech

Alt-Internet

Slate planned a hit piece on the Alt-Tech movement, then realized that perhaps the Alt-Right may have a point with regards to Internet censorship being an all-too-slippery slope.

However distasteful its views, the alt-right has smartly framed its battle in terms of “free speech.” This argument has currency elsewhere on the right, too. President Trump is fond of calling out Amazon, perhaps chiefly because of Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos’ ownership of the Washington Post. Fox News’ Tucker Carlson said on his show earlier this month that “Google should be regulated like the public utility it is, to make sure it doesn’t further distort the free flow of information to the rest of us.” Former Trump aide and Breitbart executive chairman Steve Bannon has also argued that tech platforms should be regulated like utilities. Combined with Democrats making antitrust regulation a central tenet of their new policy platform, the internet’s gatekeepers could soon be put on notice as never before.

It would be hard not to spot the irony if one of the most significant threats to big tech’s monopolistic power ends up being caused by hate groups. Gab’s Sanduja believes that Apple and Google shutting out his company from their app marketplaces prevents it from accessing 70 to 75 percent of its potential U.S. market. Even if you agree with banning Gab, the power of a handful of companies to banish anyone from the internet should give you pause. And it is one reason why the arguments of alt-tech advocates may find more and more friendly ears in Silicon Valley, where many entrepreneurs increasingly worry they can’t compete.

It’s also hard not to see this conundrum as big tech’s fault from the start. In a way, the alt-right is calling out the essential tension of the major internet companies, which espouse “don’t be evil” philosophies and want to “bring the world closer together,” yet also owe their popularity (and profits) to an internet where seemingly anything goes, until they say it doesn’t. Banning Nazis may be a perfectly defensible stance, but given the inconsistent transparency and enforcement of community guidelines from tech companies, it also has the whiff of the arbitrary.

In a more plural market, Facebook and Google and GoDaddy would be just as free to boot odious ideologies—but they wouldn’t face the same accusations of speech suppression, because places like Daily Stormer would have more places to go for their social-networking and domain-hosting needs. The early ideal of the internet was that of a great commons where all kinds of diverse opinions could be shared, where people could come to understand each other and to be convinced of new, challenging ideas. That particular utopian wish list may have always been naïve, but the notion that an open internet should not be controlled by a small group of corporations beholden only to shareholders continues to hold sway for a reason. Facebook was only ever supposed to be part of the public commons; the walled garden was never meant to subsume it.

Which may be why Gab and its Free Speech Tech Alliance has gained the trust of Nazis but can also invoke the rhetoric of left-wing antitrusters—well, to a point. “If Google and Apple are straight-up corporations for their political sides, they should openly declare their discriminatory behavior. They should be proud of it,” said Gab’s Sanduja. “They should not be mendacious and talk about change and be different. Stop engaging in sophistry. Come out to us as the major SJW platforms you are.”

The funny thing was that they really wanted to talk to Gab’s Torba, not Sanduja. Because, of course, Sanduja didn’t fit the original intended Narrative of Alt-Tech being nothing but white supremacist Nazis.

The tech crackdown is weakness

As well as an opportunity to foxnews the f——- at Facebook, Wikipedia, Twitter, and the other social media giants.

This year, the world’s largest social network will see a decline among teen users in the U.S., according to a forecast by EMarketer. It’s the first time the research company has predicted a fall in Facebook usage for any age group.
EMarketer predicts 14.5 million people from the ages of 12 to 17 will use Facebook in 2017, a drop of 3.4 percent from the prior year. Teens are migrating instead to Snap Inc.’s Snapchat and Instagram, the photo-sharing app that Facebook owns, the research company said Monday in a statement.
Facebook has continued to grow around the world, with more than 2 billion users this year, but younger people are finding it less compelling, said Oscar Orozco, a forecasting analyst at EMarketer.

The Facebook/Twitter business model is an intrinsically fraudulent one, propped up by debt and ideology. Which means, of course, that their decline will be unexpectedly fast once it begins. And it is coming soon. Twitter has already ceased to grow. Facebook will follow suit soon. All they will succeed in doing is fracturing and further decentralizing the Internet, which will serve us, not them.
The reason they are cracking down hard now is that they realize their window of opportunity to do so is closing. This is why there is no reason to panic when another deplatforming happens. All that a deplatforming accomplishes is to ensure that a new platform will come into being to replace it.
Remember, there was a time not all that long ago when SJW fans of John Scalzi bragged that his blog traffic was vastly bigger than mine. Now that mine is more than 5x his, he switched to bragging about his 111,329 followers and 178 million annual Twitter impressions… and I am now on pace to equal or exceed his 2016 monthly average of 14.8 million Twitter impressions this month.
The world is a dynamic place. It will knock you down, but when you get up again, hardened by the experience, the experience only makes you that much more formidable.
That being said, the next anti-Right tech strike will be more systematic and multiplatform. I expect that if I am targeted, my accounts will be vanished from Twitter, Blogger, and Gmail simultaneously,  (I don’t really use Facebook or Paypal) which is why I am already set up with more reliable alternatives for literally every social media and payment platform, and have arranged for direct email access to every VFM, Book Club, and Daily Meme Wars member. If you want to make sure that you’re immediately alerted and provided with the alternatives, I recommend signing up for either the Book Club or if you don’t mind daily emails, the Daily Meme Wars.

Tech conservatives move Alt Right

My free trade debate opponent, Dr. James Miller, has published a piece on Business Insider about the way in which conservatives like himself are gravitating towards the Alt Right under the growing pressure from SJWs in technology.

Many Business Insider readers won’t trust an anonymous Breitbart interview, but for what’s relevant to this article, please do trust that this Googler’s views accurately reflects how many on the right think about SJWs.
Vox Day, a leader of the alt-right, wrote a book called “SJWs Always Lie” with the explicit goal to “show you how SJWs operate, teach you how to see through their words, explain how to correctly anticipate their actions, and give you the weapons you need to successfully thwart their inevitable attempts to disqualify you, discredit you, and destroy your reputation.”
Damore’s firing is probably going to cause many Silicon Valley Republicans to prepare themselves by reading this book.
The key difference in tactics between the alt-right and traditional right is that the alt-right doesn’t place much value on playing fair, and they mock conservatives’ seeming desire to lose honorably. On a recent Periscope video Vox said that his supporters in tech companies (which he claims are numerous) should “be the second or third most enthusiastic SJW in your group.”
He considers SJWs to be the enemy that’s beyond reason. When a commentator suggested that publically supporting SJW views might give them legitimacy, Vox said “F— legitimacy. You are thinking like a conservative…”
It will be poisonous if the tech right feels compelled to not only hide their beliefs but also to actively pretend to believe in progressive diversity values. This pretending will embitter them, probably pushing many to the more radical alt-right…. Business works best if different political tribes don’t seek to crush others when they have a temporary upper-hand. If, however, the right perceived that SJWs are after them, it’s understandable (if regrettable) that they will treat SJWs likewise when they have the power.
Although the left greatly outnumbers the right in tech, if the right uses stealth tactics and the left doesn’t, the right might eventually gain an advantage in the career-destroying game because they will more easily locate high-value targets.
As a free market Republican, I dislike most of the alt-right policy views. But my kind are not inclined to fight an underhanded company by company dirty political war, while the alt-right is. If SJWs force the tech right into these fights, they will push them into the eager arms of the alt-right.

People have no use for the McClellans and the parade ground generals once the shooting starts. They need Grants and Shermans and Pattons, and they know it. The Alt Right is the only right that fights. That is why it is the only Right that will command any allegiance from all the various right-leaning, pro-Western, pro-Christian, pro-freedom, pro-white, and pro-nationalist populations.

Google takes a stand

It’s a bold move by Sundararajan. We’ll see how it works out for him. It was inevitable, because SJWs always double down, but the irony of Pichai Sundararajan, a high-caste Tamil Brahmin, firing an employee for expressing his belief in biological inequality, is practically off the charts.

Google has fired an employee who wrote an internal memo that ascribed gender inequality in the technology industry to biological differences. James Damore, the engineer who wrote the memo, confirmed his dismissal saying that he had been fired for “perpetuating gender stereotypes,” in an email to Reuters on Monday. Damore said he is exploring all possible legal remedies.

As I observed after reading the Google CEO’s memo, Damore was doomed because Sundararajan had to mollify his insane SJW employee base, which right now is dancing and celebrating its own inevitable demise. Damore will be fine; he’s better off out of the SJW-converged madhouse and has already been offered jobs by Gab’s Andrew Torba and WikiLeaks’s Julian Assange. But Google will not be, because this is a clear signal to the key engineers in Search and AdWords that it is Time To Go.
DH, who is one of the Dread Ilk’s expert data guy’s, explains.

All of Google is kept afloat by one thing only. Adwords. They have no other significant source of income after a decade or more of trying to diversify. Every other business is borderline trivial when compared to AdWords. All the moonshots have failed. All the R&D has failed. It’s. All. AdWords.
The money-making core of Google is a tiny speck of its workforce, a tiny core of people who make AdWords work. The fear is not that 2/3 are SJWs, it’s that one or two or three of the key engineers, who are working on the next version of Search and Adwords, who are actively fighting and hardening against existential threats to the product, might walk, or even just do a slightly less great job.
Google is actually a very fragile company. They are ripe for disruption from a new player, or alternatively, to be drained from a few deep pocketed rivals. The entire bubble of online advertising stems from a belief that is often irrational that online advertising is effective at certain definitions of cost effectiveness.

In other words, as the AdWords model fails, which is already happening, Google’s massive market cap is going to rapidly decline with it because all of its other businesses have failed to find traction. The company has observably entered the ideological death spiral that is the inevitable result of the Impossibility of Social Justice Convergence.

Vid.Me is SJW-converged

It is now evident that Vid.Me is not a possible replacement for YouTube. They are not a serious service, and actually appear to be even more converged than either YouTube or Twitter.

We’re writing to let you know that we’ve reviewed your application for verification, but unfortunately we won’t be able to verify you at this time.

We’re still a small team, so we can’t give you detailed feedback on why your application wasn’t approved, but here are some common reasons:

    Haven’t met the minimum follower threshold of 50

    No cover photo, profile avatar, or videos uploaded

    Limited interaction with the Vidme community

    Not adhering to the Vidme rules

Also, sometimes we make mistakes. We’re imperfect carbon-based lifeforms.

For the record:


Voxday
7 videos
1,006 views
99 video points
270 followers
Joined Jul 24, 2017

Here are some of the people they verified at the same time they denied me verification, which is required for access to the settings that allow for creating subscriptions:

Midgeman
4 videos
9 views
8 video points
2 followers
Joined Jul 21, 2017

SayMo
180 views
8 video points
11 followers
Joined Jun 23, 2017

Casanova
0 views
0 video points
9 followers
Joined Aug 01, 2017

I also discovered that their settings don’t permit giving external supporters from Patreon or wherever access to the premium content, so it wasn’t going to be an option anyhow unless and until they got their act together with regards to that feature. So, thanks very much to all of you who followed and helped me determine that Vid.Me is not a viable option for anyone on the Right.

Needless to say, I will not be making further use of their service. It’s not a problem, though, as I already have several alternatives; this simply happened to be the first one that was recommended to me.

Update: I’m not the only one.

QNTKKA‏ @Qntkka
They would not verify me because of my content. They are MORE SJW than YouTube.

Vox Day on vid.me

I’ve created a new channel for my videos on Vid.Me. I’m not certain that we’ll be using it for the forthcoming Voxiversity yet, but if nothing else it is a good place for selected Darkstreams. I’m not sure why the Darkstreams uploaded to YouTube by Judeo Christ appear to be of lower video quality than those uploaded by Open Mind, but hopefully we will sort that out.

Anyhow, I need 36 more followers before I can get verified, so if you’re signed up there and you don’t mind, please follow. I spoke with one of the Vid.Me guys on Twitter today; unlike YouTube, they have a way of limiting content to paid subscribers, the problem is that they don’t yet have a way of allowing the creator to provide paid subscriber access to unpaid subscribers who are supporting the creator through another method like Kickstarter or Patreon.

They also appear to be less converged than YouTube, which is a pretty low bar, of course, but is one reason to utilize them in preference to the current industry standard.

Now, obviously, there will be plenty of free general content for everyone, which will go on the YouTube Voxiversity channel as well as my Vid.Me channel. But if anyone has any ideas on the ideal way to distribute premium video content that is limited to patrons, please feel free to share them.

A failure of SJW

In an announcement that will surprise precisely no one in the Alt-Tech movement, Twitter has ceased to expand its user base:

Twitter shares tumble as it reveals it has added NO new users in the past three months. Twitter had 328 million average monthly active users (MAU) in the three months through June 30, unchanged from the previous quarter.  Analysts were expecting 328.8 million, according to financial data and analytics firm FactSet. Shares had run up some 40 percent since mid-April as Twitter investors bet on another quarter of growth after the microblogging service reported adding 9 million more monthly active users than expected in the first quarter.

Apparently the SJW-run Trust & Safety Council is engendering neither. And I note that 800,000 is pretty close to the number of people who are now on Gab. Apparently Alt-Tech can have an impact on the social media giants even before they launch serious bids to replace them.

SJWs always lie: Patreon edition

Patreon’s ludicrously lame excuse for canceling Lauren Southern’s account.

Hi Lauren,

My name is Max and I am a member of the Trust and Safety team at patreon.

Here at Patreon we believe in freedom of speech. We are creating a platform that empowers creators to share and debate ideas. When ideas cross into action, though, we sometimes must take a closer look at what our creators are doing with the funds they earn through Patreon.

It appears that you are currently raising funds in order to take part in activities that are likely to cause loss of life. We have therefore decided to remove your page from Patreon, and paid out your final balance of $95.00 to you.

We understand that this will come as a disappointment. Please know that we have come to this decision after a long review process and will not consider an appeal.

Thank you for your understanding.

Regards,

Patreon Trust+Safey

Never have anything to do with any organization with a “Trust and Safety” team. Fortunately, there are rock-solid alternatives on the way, as I will be announcing soon.

Too woke for this world

James Delingpole laments the passing of Godfrey Elfwick, the truest social justice warrior and the wokest of them all.

To have your tweet singled out for praise by Godfrey was the kiss of death. It meant that you were a humorless, self-righteous, deluded, smug, sanctimonious, insufferable Social Justice Warrior. Just like Godfrey purported to be.

Which is why, of course, Twitter had to silence him. Sure, the official reason given for Godfrey’s permanent ban was because he had broken Twitter’s terms of service – apparently having upset a millionaire potato chip salesman called Gary Lineker.

But the real reason, as we all know, is that Godfrey Elfwick did the thing the totalitarian cry bullies of the liberal-left fear even more than facts and reasoned argument: he ridiculed them.

It is a truth universally acknowledged by anyone who has spent more than a moment glancing at social media that SJWs can’t do jokes. Or banter. Or memes. Given that social media is mostly about jokes, banter, and memes, this means that SJWs spend their every moment on the internet in a state of near-impotent pique. They cannot strike back with wit or charm or facts or evidence or amusing images of Pepe the frog, for these are all things they singularly lack. So every time they are forced to resort to the only weapon in their armory: censorship.

The reason they can do the censorship thing is because, by unhappy accident, most of the dominant tech sites – not just Twitter, Facebook, and Google but also ones like Patreon which recently cancelled Lauren Southern’s account because she’d committed the crime of being a conservative – are run by liberals who want the whole world to think and act like liberals.

This explains their appalling double standards.

In the case of Twitter, for example, anyone on the right who tried to belittle someone with an offensive racial epithet would undoubtedly be punished with an instant and permanent ban. But when Black-Lives-Matter-endorsing rapper Talib Kweli branded Breitbart’s Jerome Hudson a “coon” for the crime of being black and conservative, no action was taken by Twitter against the rapper.

He made us all better.

Pseudo-Patreon

As you may know, both Brittany Pettibone and Lauren Southern were kicked off Patreon this week. That’s one reason why I’ve never bothered with it; I knew that I wouldn’t last 24 hours there. However, there are several alternatives that have been founded, one of which is sufficiently trustworthy from both a philosophical and a structural aspect, and so I’m probably going to set up a Patreon account style there.

So, two questions:

1) What sort of rewards are of interest? Gab TV and a YouTube channel are all in the works.

2) Should I simply focus on project-related crowdfunding instead? You see, I do not wish to disincentivize people to support Infogalactic or ALT HERO, which will be launching its crowdfunding soon. On the other hand, simple observation dictates that more people are more willing to support an individual on an ongoing basis than a specific project.

Anyhow, share your thoughts, please. I have not made any decisions as of yet.