As we found in the Twitter Files, we lean more and more on machines to do our thinking for us.
However, the worst part is, we often do not distinguish between thinking that is ours and thinking that is someone else’s.
Now instead of giving the world something invigorating and freeing like rock n’ roll, we’re exporting mass neurosis. At home we’ve become afraid to walk even a few steps without our electronic helpers. Our sense of self is now inextricably tied to a huge global entourage of prying commentators who live in those phones of ours that are always in our pockets and whose good opinion we never stop seeking, whether we admit it or not. This was never us before…we long celebrated the individual, even if the individual seemed crazy.
But thinking for yourself is hard work, and political interests in the Internet age have preyed on another very American instinct: laziness.
Their sophisticated programs begin with the premise that the Internet always punishes difference and rewards conformity. This is the core principle at work in shadow-banning and de-amplification algorithms. These automated surveillance tools look for phrases like “Open-minded” or “I like to do my own research” or “I’m generally apolitical” and don’t score the people saying such things as tolerant, creative freethinkers. What the algorithm instead detects is someone harboring a dangerous willingness to embrace unorthodox ideas or look at a forbidden thing and not flee.
Young people especially are worried to the point of mental illness about their likes and ratios. We not only want people to know what we think, we’re terrified of people not knowing what we think, lest we be suspected of harboring something unsavory underneath.
This is how it is for Americans trying to be themselves now.
First they became addicted to the Internet as a tool of convenience. Then it became a cheap substitute for real-life interaction. Finally they learned to submit to the wisdom of “crowds”, which on the Internet, as we also found out, is really an artificial representation of a crowd, generated by political and social engineers from the FBI, DHS, the Pentagon, Meta, Google, and other bureaucracies. These groups are letting loose algorithms on that “Spirit of liberty” Justice Hand talked about. The results have not been good.
If they can preemptively extinguish that fire in us, formal censorship will become unnecessary. The population will become too fearful of difference to ever risk punishment in the first place. That moment is close at hand. This is why I’m so grateful for events like this and to people like yourselves. I believe you all know the patriotic importance of preserving that spirit.
Meanwhile, these people who would have us glued to our phones, perennially afraid of electronic whispers, they’re as American as redcoats.
