A few months ago, I quit contributing to John McAfee's libertarian "down-ticket" race (Sheriff, State Legislature) organization site, "Vote Different," online at:
I was heavily-involved with the Vote Different project planning tools, "slack" and later, "mattermost" that were set up to design the site. I provided a ridiculous amount of highly-useful information about how State Legislative candidates could "redirect" Gary Johnson campaign money to pay themselves to get on the ballot for State Legislature. This included lots of research about the candidates that the National LP was not promoting, and that the PA LP was too disorganized to even list contact information for.
Historically, directing poorly-spent money from the National LP to local efforts has been a winning tactic that overcomes the internal corruption/infiltration of the Libertarian Party.
Then, one day, a post of mine was deleted by the moderator for not being "nice enough." (I harshly criticized a delusional libertarian candidate running for a House race that is contested with $10,000,000 for sucking money/time/effort away from winnable Sheriff and State Legislative races.) So, I deleted my profile there and have not contributed a moment of time to it since.
All it takes is the supreme hubris of censorship to drive all the intelligent people from a web-based platform. The moderator of the mattermost site claimed that there was no presumption of free speech because it was "a productivity tool, not a forum." OK, whatever. It's now a productivity tool that proclaims its goal of supporting down-ticket candidates that lacks my input, and my 16 years of placing down-ticket candidates on the ballot (and often getting thwarted in attempting to do so by the National LP).
Will the same thing happen with Steem? Probably, ...unless they wear their commitment to absolute freedom of speech on their shirt-sleeves. The existing government is not stupid, and they notice threats to their continued dominance. It is easy for them to infiltrate groups who oppose them, and Steem, no doubt, has government goons analyzing its traffic, posting on the site, and attempting to ingratiate themselves with the Whales and Steem decision-makers. These things happen "by default." After all, our enemy "prints the money."
So how do we prevent them from destroying what we're doing to build a better world or bootstrap to Enlightenment 2.0? Simple: We allow ALL speech. We allow vile S&M porn artwork, dick pics, viagra advertisements, ISIS videos, "hatespeech," and SPAM. We find a way to minimize that content(allowing it to be expanded on request). We allow those who wish to see it to set their filters to "see everything." More sensitive people can set their filters to "see everything above a score of -100," or "see everything except things expressly labeled as SPAM." Even more sensitive people can set their filters to "Only see things in the Cancer+Immunotherapy keyword category that are ranked above 200+ upvotes.
In order to prevent external control of ANY libertarian organization, that libertarian organization must be
- open to criticism
- free speech absolutist
If it's not, it's a worthless piece of shit that simply wastes the time of radical libertarians, allowing them the illusion of influence/organization, and then stripping them of that influence when and where it can (however controversially) do the most good.
Steem could replace both "Vote Different" and the National Libertarian Party. If Steem is free speech absolutist, it will win over people like myself who understand how horribly infiltrated and crippled the Libertarian Party is, and how to improve it.
Or, Steem can stay the way it seems to be right now: as a way for a few "Whales" to pat themselves and a few "early adopters" on the back.
I'm here because I hope that Steemit will become a powerhouse that effectively sucks half the users away from Twitter and Facebook, allowing those who have specialized in some highly-useful-but-underappreciated area (like myself) to prosper with good writing.
...But it could be truly revolutionary. In fact, a truly open informational system could even smash the grotesque, prohibitionist, "two-party system" police state.
Looking forward to it!
PS: Here was the time-sensitive information I provided to "Vote Different" for just the state of Pennsylvania. I did so while it was still possible to place all of these candidates on the ballot by "piggy-backing" them with the National-LP-financed Statewide Candidates. Few candidates benefitted from this information in time to use it, due to the slowness of the Vote Diffferent team in recognizing its value and posting it. Was this intentional? Because it likely cost the Libertarian Party several elected seats, and the same person to fail to update the site was the person who deleted my posts, driving me off the website. THIS IS WHY LIBERTARIANS DON'T WIN ELECTIONS, AND FAIL TO SHAPE SOCIETY. It has nothing to do with "The public just isn't ready for the message of liberty" etc.:
The Pennsylvania file that shows 2 weeks worth of the work I did. Consider: Nobody posted any of this information online. I had to track it all down. I then had to look up all the maps, and create maps that clearly showed the petitioners where the areas of overlap were. I also did this with enough time to salvage ballot access for all of the races.:
I liked (and helped shape) the original stated goals of "Vote Different." They were precisely a recipe for forcing the existing political establishment to take the libertarian movement seriously, and for directly causing real-world change in the direction of true individual liberty.
I'd return and continue to do work for them if every user was given a guarantee of absolute free speech. Meaning: No content is ever "deleted," or "taken down" or "made unavailable."
Those making the content are investing their time and effort into communicating online. Just like a cop shouldn't be able to tell them to "shut up" on a valuable (high traffic) public sidewalk, a moderator shouldn't be able to shut them up on a valuable (high traffic) website.