Read on Twitter
there has never been a time when radical ideas were not marginalized nor when popular passions didn’t lead to censoriousness over science, gender, politics, etc. the difference is we have like four monopolistic enterprises in control of all news, social networking and data.. also
as the material basis for meaningful politics has collapsed (as the state becomes constrained by capital’s freedom of mov’t plus low rates of profit) so too have practical politics and ideology become just another culture war or an individualistic display of self-identity
left with the choice of various flavors of austerity alongside an increasingly atomized and attenuated society alongside a monopolistic media and faltering state, we look for meaningful politics where we can find it, in shallow online displays of affiliation and identity. ergo..
the free speech debate (which should just be about smashing up big tech) becomes a million other debates about who is being harmed, censored, endangered, etc and so hysterical bc bombastic online speech is all we really have anymore in the eternal present of capitalist realism
this is my attempt i guess to wade into the free speech wars. i find it so difficult to engage bc so many separate issues - 1A, corp power, science, valid criticism, deplatforming, cancelation so on - often get conflated and the whole debate becomes really confused and confusing
