Google Has Crossed the Creepy Line

Way back in the early nineties, the corporations briefly seized control of the Internet, with services like Prodigy, CompuServe, and America Online overshadowing the free and open web. Most of you aren’t old enough to remember all that, but it was terrible. After taking a couple decades to regroup, the sinister multinationals have once again managed to seize control of web and are now scrambling to censor, control, and monetize every last corner of it.

And even if you don’t mind everything to the right of Lindsey Graham being censored as “hate speech,” you probably do mind the steady increase in the number of things that are “premium content,” behind a pay wall, or exclusively for members of “Prime” this or “Members” that. For a huge subset of Internet users–perhaps the majority–the actual web beyond Facebook, Amazon, Google, Apple, and Twitter (the FAGATs) is already just about dead.

They’ve all been censoring America’s nationalists for as long as they’ve been around, of course. Fortunately for us, their recent overreach into censoring and manipulating mainstream neocon outlets has provoked a kosher conservative response. Nothing’s ever a problem until it’s a Jew’s problem. Had (((Dr. Epstein))), Alex Jones, and the #MAGApedes over at Reddit not been targeted and silenced, practically nobody would know or care about this pervasive Orwellian project to deploy AI and machine learning algorithms (as well as good old fashioned direct censorship) to mold public opinion and manipulate the political process.

A sea change came, of course, with the 2016 election results. In the hysterical panic following Trump’s victory, the time-honored Internet tradition of offering (ostensibly) open, apolitical platforms was washed away. It was replaced with a conviction that they have not only the right but a grave duty to censor and silence what’s “evil” while promoting what’s “good.” Seemingly overnight, Google’s mission went from “don’t be evil” to “defeat evil,” with a mandate to cross “the creepy line” if necessary.

For any serious philosopher or metapolitical thinker, the challenge of defining what’s actually “good” and “evil” is astoundingly difficult. But behold your typical Silicon Valley wanker, his ego awash in money and success, his mind unfettered by any serious philosophical grounding or political theory. His entire world is confined to the artificial, sterile, corporate campus which deviates only slightly from the university campus he graduated from and the elite magnet school he grew up in. He imagines himself cosmopolitan because he constantly works and plays with other cognitive elites from global elite hotspots in Asia, India, and Europe. They all share pretty much identical politics, …at least the politics they confess to him openly.

Chinese engineers are adept at mirroring and patronizing their baizuo hosts while supporting strident nationalist policies back home that would make your typical White Nationalist blush.

The typical Silicon Valley guy’s confidence that his neoliberal groupthink is objectively correct is unassailable. For him, Trump’s evil populist campaign exploited algorithmic flaws in his system, exploiting Soviet manipulation of social media to bamboozle the American public into choosing evil over good. It’s all just another bug in his code, an exploit to be patched. It’s his job to demonstrate in the upcoming midterms that he’s fixed the bug, refactoring his software so that it generates the correct output next time: a blue wave.

All of his friends and colleagues are watching and waiting intently to see if he’s “fixed” the election, in both senses of the word. These same folks who insist that a small family bakery must be required by law to serve the homosexual agenda in the name of fairness insist that since Facebook is technically merely a business, it has every right to pick and choose what political opinions it allows and promotes on its platform. While koshercons and r/TheDonald may well hold out hope that they can win their political voices back with awareness campaigns like “The Creepy Line,” consistent nationalists with coherently anti-globalist goals must necessarily look toward AltTech solutions to our problems.

Torba’s Gab is definitely an inspiring revolt against censorship from within the heart of Silicon Valley itself. But it’s a half-measure and it’s on borrowed time. It’s definitely a valuable solution to tide us over until a genuinely decentralized censor-proof solution comes online. But it’s only a matter of time before either the fully centralized and increasingly politicized DNS system deprives them of a domain name. Or the shrinking network of multinational corporations which own and operate the Internet’s hosting infrastructure–Amazon AWS, Microsoft Azure, etc…–will pull the plug, as Microsoft threatened to do to Gab last week.

And that’s all assuming that Torba can resist the siren song of investment capital and social pressure urging him to chase off the hardliners and cash in on all the Trump voters out there eager to find a welcome platform for themselves that censors folks to the left and right of them alike. All in all, I admire Torba and believe he’s earned a degree of trust. The few decisions he’s made against nationalists were largely out of his hand, given his domain and hosting restrictions. But with our very ability to communicate at stake, our long term goal must be working toward a solution that doesn’t depend on some nice guy’s generosity.

While our movement’s still reeling from the oligarchs’ thunderous response to 2016 and Charlottesville, there’s a lot to be hopeful about. “The Creepy Line” is a promising development, one which demonstrates that Silicon Valley’s response to us has been broad and sloppy enough in scope to injure and inconvenience some Zionist and corporate interests. There’s now a large and growing national debate, one guaranteed to grow in the coming months, about how much control over our society is wielded by a handful of arrogant, entitled Bay Area spergs.

The answer lies in cryptography, in massive decentralization, and in returning to the open source, open platform spirit and principles that made the Internet great in the first place. As a man who’s old enough to have logged into Prodigy, I can tell you first hand that a centralized, corporate web is a shitty, boring, unimaginative, and heavily censored digital gulag we must avoid at all costs.

Google has officially, without debate, crossed the creepy line. It’s time for nationalists to be the pioneering force in charting the next generation of the Internet, one that fixes the bugs in this one which empowered a handful of American corporations to take complete control over it. The tree of digital liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the code of activists, open source hobbyists, and entrepreneurs.