Stable Diffusion
I became interested in writing for Medium in large part because of the apparent quality of discussion there. It’s not the shit flinging primate house that is Facebook, nor the similar tragedy of the commons Twitter is turning into under its new management. Exploring the offerings there revealed a wide variety of viewpoints, too. I imagined, perhaps naively, that Medium would not share the fate of many prior platforms I’ve enjoyed in the past.
Resetera, Reddit and Something Awful are a few examples of once popular forums I have fond memories of wasting my time on in my youth…only for all of them to undergo the same inexplicable, overnight transformation. One of the mods is replaced by a newcomer with certain political leanings.
Then, that person puts their foot in the door for more of their buddies to take over other mod positions, until everyone in a position of power to control speech on that platform has the exact same politics. Before this change, anything could be discussed. Agreement is not guaranteed by any stretch. You may be flamed if it’s a bad take (and often even if it’s a good one) but you can post it, and so long as it doesn’t contain any words from a pretty short list, it stays up.
After power has changed hands, a great many topics are no longer up for debate. Agreement is guaranteed now, because anything other than agreement results in an instant permaban with no explanation or recourse. The justification is an appeal to morality, from people who position their own morality as objective and absolute, while urging (for example) Christians not to impose their morality onto others who don’t share their beliefs. Perhaps they learned from the best, as what they seek to establish in these cases amount to modern day blasphemy laws.
This is cause for concern to any lover of truth, because it’s how bad ideas are defended. Good ideas are like well built castles which stand on their own, against the siege weapons of critical analysis. Bad ideas are shoddily built castles which remain standing only because of the magic shield of censorship, without which the first siege would topple them.
This is why those married to bad ideas always seek protection from critique, and always utilize pearl clutching moralism to justify it. “Won’t someone think of the children?” was the puritan’s rallying cry. The rallying cry of the neopuritans is “won’t someone think of marginalized groups?” It is under this banner, the pretense of compassion, that the crybully silences you. Never mind if they’re factually wrong! Nobody will ever find out, because nobody is able to question them.
There are not only immoral reasons to dispute certain details of the progressive narrative. I myself am an atheist social democrat. But I’m also autistic. Accuracy is of paramount importance to me. My hierarchy of moral priorities privileges truth above all other ideals, with morality a close second. To me, this seems unquestionably right, and any other ordering is uncomfortably alien.
I understand, then, why my own order of priorities strikes most allistics as uncomfortably alien. They do not even know they have a hierarchy of moral priorities, having never thought about it before. To them, the conclusions they personally arrived at re: moral philosophy are just common sense, and “how to be a good person”. Also how Christians characterize their religion, not coincidentally.
Knowledge that different people can arrive at different orders of moral priorities without simply being wicked tempers my unease. But people oblivious to this concept experience something like the uncanny valley, a reflexive revulsion, to anybody who arrived at an order that differs even slightly from their own. It manifests in mostly similar answers to social issues, but not completely identical, which they interpret as flaws in your very soul rather than legitimate differences of opinion resulting from a different order of priorities.
People like this roll their eyes when you complain that they do not tolerate even the smallest divergence from their values. Then, they prove you right immediately after that when you list the 99 things you agree on, followed by the one that you disagree on. “Well of course you can’t simply “disagree” about that” they say, just as they would no matter which point you failed to align with them on.
Maybe I was the fool to imagine an oasis existed which that intellectual wasteland had not yet intruded upon. But it didn’t take long to find accounts of political censorship on Medium. I only didn’t know of them until now because I thought so highly of Medium that it didn’t occur to me to look.
Notably they’re all the same story. Everyone perma’d from Medium seems to have been yeeted for exactly the same reason. Most likely by a very ideologically samey set of content curators, I speculate. As they arranged for, they’re now the uncontested ‘little dictators’ of this virtual North Korea. But they make the same mistake the Kims have, in ignoring that there exists a world outside of their walls, and powers greater than theirs.
There’s no recourse within Medium, but there is recourse outside of it. I don’t mean the longshot of Elon Musk buying Medium either. It would be the bitterest of pyrrhic victories to overturn the little dictators, only to then witness Medium’s level of discourse plummet to the Earth’s core. Rather, the possibility that legislation like this may eventually be proposed at the federal level, and pass, thanks to a newly conservative leaning SCOTUS.
There are surely many design problems with the Texan law against social media censorship. Vagueness about what qualifies being one that critics have commonly pointed out. But is there not already such a problem? When we’re not told explicitly what qualifies as a TOS violation, we can only discover where the lines are by crossing them. Assuming the rules were applied consistently, that is.
I’m sort of beyond caring though, ready to simply burn it all down. At this point, based on what I’ve seen, Medium’s cancer is terminal. It’s the same cancer which turned Resetera, Reddit and SA into sycophant cess pits, as well as pre-Musk Twitter. I don’t have high hopes that Medium wouldn’t share Twitter’s fate, if indeed the government forces some measure of impartiality in content moderation.
I can imagine all sorts of disingenuous games they might play to flout the law, and the legendary fits they would pitch in protest. I was there, after all, to witness the melodramatic “I’m leaving Twitter!” declarations by people still on there today, and predictions of its imminent collapse within 24 hours of the buyout (also yet to manifest). People married to bad ideas, who rely entirely on the protection of censorship to maintain them, absolutely lose their minds when that protection is pried away.
I’d like to keep Medium mostly as-is, if that’s possible. I only want the ruling class to compromise on a single issue. But I despair that, based on my experience with bad idea people and their legions of censors, that “compromise” is not in their vocabulary. They’re deeply accustomed to absolute control, as defense of their ideas is impossible without it, so they have no plan for what to do if ever the boot’s on the other foot. Their plan is to always be the one wearing the boot, forever and ever.
Now might be a good time for “compromise” to enter their lexicon though. Ruling in a unilateral, unapologetically biased manner tends to breed contempt that only mounts with time. Musk didn’t fire all the Twitter content moderators spontaneously because he’s a wicked man. They had, by that time, been storing up punishments for themselves over fifteen years. That’s a lot of time for resentment to build.
There was a relief valve for that pressure, called “compromise”, available to them all along. They just never used it because they never felt as if they needed to. Like companies which use proprietary standards under the assumption they will never go out of business (and you’re stuck with a bunch of defunct, no longer supported gear if they do) tech tyrants don’t plan for their own downfall. So, it’s up to us to plan it for them.