As many have pointed out, Substack is facing increasing pressure from the narrative gatekeepers since it’s grown very rapidly in the last couple of years, and since it’s allowing dissident voices to make a genuine impact.
For many reasons, this pressure is to be expected.
By their very nature, all forms of mass communications media, from even organized recitation of verse in oral cultures, to today’s jumble of digital propaganda mainlining, are always primarily a tool of the social hierarchy. An instrument of the ruling class, the elite caste, or whatever authority structure you’re dealing with.
Mass media in this most general sense, propagating itself from the centre to the periphery and from the few to the many, is at its heart the activity of the established power structure towards realizing its own intentions.
But this is a double-edged sword, since historically, these kinds of tools could always be subverted and used to counteract or depart from the goals and intentions of the ruling classes.
The advent of the printing press in Europe is a case in point. Even though it strengthened central authority significantly, it also enabled organized popular resistance of every conceivable kind, and its appearance coincides with the emergence of something akin to a political consciousness among the general population.
The attempts to deplatform Substack is really nothing less than the ensuing repeated censorships of Voltaire’s books by the French government in the early 18th century, just ahead of the Age of Revolutions. It’s similar to the Nazi’s book burnings, or the Pinochet regime’s mass destruction of politically subversive material in the early 70s.
Same thing. These are tactics for controlling actual and potential dissent that could interfere with the goals and intentions of the established power structure. They will always be employed if it’s deemed necessary, and for the very same reason, in what’s called “modern democracies”, such quaint touchstones as freedom of speech or freedom of the press have always been conditional.
In other words, the press is always only free insofar its output does not meaningfully interfere with the intentions, goals and desires of the power elite. You can vote on a set of preselected candidates, parties or cliques, as long as their participation in the power structure doesn’t rock the boat too much.
But there’s always counter-organizing. There’s always subversion and sabots to be thrown into the gears.
Or there at least used to be.
The main difference about the Substack deplatforming, and of similar contemporary attempts at tethering and controlling forums for discourse, is that they’re potentially invincible and all-encompassing.
Back in the day, while the powers that be could just burn books, smash the printing presses and hang the editors, anyone and his dog could just build everything from scratch again and start over. Anywhere.
With today’s centralized internet architecture and its incredible capacity for propaganda, the necessity of digital transactions, and the push towards all-encompassing surveillance, there’s a potential to actually construct an essentially undefeatable censorship machine.
For one, there’s already an effective social credit system in place, right here in the West. Big data mass surveillance already knows your face, your whereabouts, and your spending habits. Add to that organized penalties for infractions of “community guidelines” in the increasingly centralized, monolithic social media architecture that’s more or less integrated with the banking system, and you have a tacitly emergent, ubiquitous social credit system. You don’t need to intentionally and explicitly build one. The character of the technology and its design will over time reproduce the basic intentions of the power stucture.
And meaningful dissent, as most of us know, is being penalized through shadowbanning or social ostracization by the useful idiots of the volunteer thought police.
Information is being curated by filtering algorithms, and actively generated by large language models that are not only used for supporting approved narratives, but that due to their very structure will tend towards reproducing and permanenting the already-dominant points of view. You don’t need anything like an active conspiracy. In the very near future, all of our kids will be educated by AI shills whose only purpose is to extract surplus value from the workers and sell you things you don’t need.
If the people of this period in history are blocked from avenues of subversion and dissent, that loss of access could be final. It could remain for a thousand years. That boot stamping on a human face, essentially forever.
For these reasons, our contemporary struggle is more important than any similar political undertaking throughout the modern period.
If we lose platforms like Substack, and if the digital architecture becomes structurally “vaccinated” against them ever emerging again, the battle is lost.
Ahh, the medium is the message.
Look, there were hundreds of small newsletters and newspapers during the Kill Vietnamese War Genocide, and they were draftees, screaming out, Sir, No Sir. The thugs in MIC and McCarthy swines and Jewish virals, all against this sort of activity.
Try having a mimeograph machine -- remember those in schools, oh, the smell of the paper! -- cranking out anti-Zuckereberg-anti-USA-anti-Capitalism-anti-Green Porn-anti-Israel-anti-Techie material, and then listing some actions and places for which to do some monkeywrenching.
Oh, come on, that is outlawed. Putting those cool little newletters around town? CCTV got ya.
Imagine that, and now, I type this, and the fuckers know who is typing it. DOn't matter if it's responding to Substack, because the powers will fine me, find penalties, look for arreats, dig into credit and background reports, will go to my school and health records, will find my motor vechile infractions, and because it's ME, out there, in the news, writing the news, and teaching, well well, there are so many little Good Germans/snitches as far as the fucking eye can see.
We need to circle the wagons, and we need to harp daily that the system is a giant spiritual and intellectual STD factory. Poison, from red team to blue team to all the fucking ostriches getting their sack of shekels for keeping low, keeping quiet, never blowing that whistle AND snitching, man.
Try being Karen Silkwood. Or Lois Gibbs. Or Rachel Carson. Watch the old methods of denigrating and delegitimizing, and now just multiple it by a facot of 10 million, since we have bowed to the Mengele Madness of Oppen-Monster-Heimers and Sam "I Will Eat Your Soul" Altman, all the way to the fucking prepper Fuckerberg, to Soros, to the billionaire and multi-millionaire Clubbing Sons of Bitches.
Just fucking kill Gawker with litigation, that's the Peter "Fascist" Thiel way.
They are shutting off grandma's heating, and whatcha gonna do about it?
Fucking write about it? No Molotovs tossed at the controllers, thrown at the banks and fucking corporate offices and at their officers and their homes, just unleashing $2.99 a gallon gasoline and frozen orange juce at them? At the fucking Kafkaesque Creeps, all of them?
Them words are hurting more than sticks and stones and sleek stilettos tossed at the fuckers.
Cheers,
https://paulokirk.substack.com/p/success-five-thousand-in-inbred-queendom
May know this publ and piece already, I'm rereading it now:
https://archive.schillerinstitute.com/fid_91-96/921_frankfurt.html
Oh and this of course warns about that piece, its author who 'now regrets ever writing those pieces and for that 'cracked-brain' 'fascist', Lyndon LaRouche
and the dangerous influence his ideas have had, or something..:
https://communemag.com/the-american-roots-of-a-right-wing-conspiracy/
By
ANDREW WOODS
a PhD candidate at the Centre for the Study of Theory and Criticism.
You figure it out and lmk, honestly !