You Knew Etsy Would Ruin Reverb

@ProfEmerald:
You say,
The government did not pull the products, the Company did. That is how a market economy works. Nothing to do with free speech.
I think -- and since you're a professor I'm willing to get into the weeds here -- we have to make a distinction between free speech simpliciter and free speech secundum quid, or "functional free speech."

I'm about to write a lot. (Sorry. I do that. If you don't like long posts, just skip this one.)

"Free Speech" means at minimum not being compelled-to-silence at gunpoint, either by government or criminal men. When you say "[n]othing to do with free speech," @ProfEmerald, you are appealing to that minimum.

But in human societies, "Free Speech" doesn't exist for its own sake; it exists because human minds and communication have, in themselves, a purpose (what the Greeks called a telos); namely, to socially exchange ideas and arrive at truth and mutual understanding. Consequently one prerequisite for "Free Speech" is the existence and openness of public spaces for interchange, in which the "Free Speech" right is exercised. Such public spaces, when they involve telecommunications, are typically subject to a section of the law known as "Common Carrier" law. BUT: Being a "Common Carrier" meant you couldn't exclude anyone, just as being a "Public Accommodation" (e.g. a hotel or restaurant) meant you couldn't refuse business just because the buyer was black. The existence of the "Common Carrier" gives functionality to your freedom-of-speech, just as your right to an attorney or public defender gives functionality to your right to a fair trial.

(BTW, the same is true of all the other "free" rights: One doesn't functionally have free exercise of religion in a country where one is forbidden from quietly giving thanks for one's meal in a restaurant, or reading a Bible on a park bench, or if building permits for churches or synagogues are routinely denied. One doesn't functionally have freedom of "peaceable assembly" if the only permitted location for protests is a ten-square-foot patch in the middle of a polluted quarry seventeen miles outside town. And so on....)

Now, we are a civilization in which certain companies (Alphabet, owner of Google Search, Google Ads, and YouTube being foremost, but also Twitter, and Facebook through Facebook and Instagram, and Amazon and eBay and Etsy, various payment gateway providers, firms like GoFundMe, most of the major banks, and a variety of cloud-hosting/e-mail-hosting platforms most people have never heard of) have become simultaneously providers of content (or, service providers for those whose "free speech" consists in generating content) and also platforms for content distribution. Traditionally in the laws of the Anglosphere, providers of content could be held liable for bad content; e.g. libel or incitement to violence. Meanwhile, platforms for content distribution -- like the telephone system -- could not be sued over the content they conveyed; only the original content-creators were held liable, even if they used that platform for distributing it. That was one of the benefits of being a "Common Carrier."

The big tech companies have, in recent years, had the best of both worlds: Their rapid growth to near-monopoly status in each sphere (e.g. YouTube for video publishing) was not purely market-driven, but the result of a virtual government subsidy: They were allowed to behave as content providers for the purpose of creating exclusive content, filtering content published on their platform according to their own tastes, and reaping ad revenue as co-creators. BUT, they were offered the special legal protections normally accorded only to neutral distribution platforms ("Common Carriers"): They could not be sued over content published using their platforms. When suits were brought, THEN they changed their tune and said, "Hey, don't blame us, we're just a neutral platform; blame the content publisher."

In short, they have all the benefits of being a "Common Carrier" without any of the legal obligations that go with it. They exempt themselves at will from carrying whatever part of the "commons" they disapprove of. And of course they have all the usual influence with lawmakers that one would expect from trillion-dollar companies perfectly positioned to filter their customers' worldviews through various kinds of content suppression (e.g. "shadowbanning" and "demonetizing"). Can anyone get elected in the state of California, any more, without kissing the rings of the tech oligarchs? Perhaps...but probably only in local offices so humble that the oligarchs can't be bothered to care.

For "functional free speech" to exist in a technological society, there need to be accessible "Common Carriers" for that speech. The tech companies that demonetize heretics (yes, I think the religious analogy is perfectly fitting, here) are acting as Common Carriers only when it suits them.

Perhaps you will answer: "Okay, fine. They don't want to be Common Carriers; so, let them officially designate themselves as private walled-gardens of content, which they can curate as exclusively as they wish."

I'm sympathetic to that view.

But that would leave a problem: Now that these platforms, benefitting from their strange legal privileges, have grown to a point of destroying most competition, what will happen if they are officially declared Not Common Carriers? Well, they will become private "walled gardens" instead of Public Accommodations. Their right to exclude heretics will remain intact...but whatever universally-accessible Common Carrier network we would have had, if it hadn't been for their strange legal privilege, was never built, and doesn't exist. Where, then, will the public find the public space for the Marketplace of Ideas?

I don't know the answer to this. It's an imperfect world; there's no perfect answer.

But the desired outcome is something like:
  • If you want to live in a bubble consisting only of certain opinions, you may select from one of several competing Walled Gardens, sign up, and live in that bubble.
  • If you don't want to live in a filtered bubble, you may also participate in a Common Carrier platform where all ideas (including some you probably find distasteful) will be found.
  • If you want to publish opinions that are unacceptable to one Walled Garden, you can join another that finds your views acceptable, and publish them there. But you can also publish them on a Common Carrier, and anyone who participates in that platform will have access to them.
  • The banks, the hosting platforms, the payment gateways, should have a status parallel to that of Common Carriers for the purpose of rejecting customers: Provided the customer is neither violating someone's rights to life, liberty, property, privacy, etc., nor unambiguously advocating for mobs to do so, their access to taking credit cards or receiving GoFundMe payments ought not be infringed.

@ProfEmerald, do you agree with me that that outcome is desirable? Isn't it rather freer than our current cultural moment?

If so, then isn't it an oversimplification to hold that certain firms deplatforming heretics is "nothing to do with free speech?"

And at least, wouldn't treating those firms consistently as either Common Carriers or Walled Gardens, according to their behavior, be better for free speech overall? (At least, it would require them to give us Truth-In-Advertising, wouldn't it?)

Rant over, This whole section of this thread should be flagged and removed.
Hmmm. That's your opinion. Is it open to discussion?

In fact, isn't the reflex instinct to memory-hole whatever's uncomfortable a large part of the problem we're discussing?
 
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Michael Fuller once emailed me that he didn't want my business because he didn't like a question I asked regarding his tape delay. He came across as quite the dick. Still, I can't disagree with the essence of his posts, as boorishly worded as they may be. IMO, the removal of his products is the result of the rising culture of silencing those with whom you disagree by using fear and intimidation. That's what is truly scary.

And, oh yeah, Etsy sucks.
 
It doesn't help that the media on both sides push it relentlessly. It's all you see. A 24/7 hammering of racial division, class envy, hate, riots, beatings, shootings, erasure of history, stereotyping, and incendiary rhetoric. News no longer exists. It's ratings and agenda.

I know politics is banned here. And I don't want to go there. I'm just extremely saddened and even a bit afraid that the two sides of the aisle have literally reach the state of being each other's enemy. We're supposed to be on the same side; one country. I'm ashamed of our elected officials on both sides.

Bring back Archie Bunker and George Jefferson, when we knew how to laugh at each other and ourselves.
 
What puzzles me is the zeal, and the extents some people go to, to silence differing opinions. The hallmark of a great society is to be able to hear both sides of issues.
John McWhorter has an interesting take on the zeal, describing it as quasi-religious inclinations of original sin, judgment day, excommunication of blasphemous heretics, etc.

The guitar community needed a scapegoat and Fulltone was it, sad.
 
Has anyone tried to use Sweetwater's Used Gear Marketplace, either as a buyer or seller?
Wondering if maybe they'll expand their push to take on Reverb, as it is experiencing some of the issues the original post mentioned.
 
John McWhorter has an interesting take on the zeal....
Yeah, there are a bunch of videos of him and Glenn Loury on YouTube, discussing all the scapegoating. It's apparently a regular thing that McWhorter and Loury do on Bloggingheads.tv. It's cool to see a couple of guys -- admittedly, some very smart guys -- talking about an emotional, fraught topic in calm, friendly ways.

I absolutely agree with McWhorter that, for some people, political ideology has replaced the role in their psychology that, 100 years ago, would have been occupied by religious belief/expression. It has become a functional religion. Now, "religion" doesn't mean "bad thing" in my lexicon; I mean something more like integrated-worldview-and-practices. But in this case, the "functional religion" McWhorter is describing is one that doesn't yet have the commandment "Thou Shalt Not Persecute Outgroups" (let alone "Love Thy Enemy" or "Pray For Those Who Persecute You") on its stone tablets! I greatly prefer the ones that do have such laws on their books; for even if their practitioners are imperfect in obeying their own morality, it at least remains possible to remind them of it.

I remember hearing a public speaker saying something like, "you can hold an ideology without it holding you." He described the phenomenon of people being "possessed" by an ideology, and unable to "wake up" from it: A kind of Stockholm Syndrome without any kidnappers.

I don't suppose someone "possessed by an ideology" will levitate with a spinning head and start projectile-barfing pea soup! But it still seems vaguely daemoniac, somehow, when:
  • words stop meaning what they're supposed to mean;
  • a person with perfectly innocent intentions can, on the slightest pretext, be pilloried as if he were a scheming James Bond villain;
  • injustices are neither properly prosecuted nor even imprudently revenged, but only prompt new injustices against innocent third-parties;
  • people and businesses are subjected to public Struggle Sessions, because some employee or family member committed wrongthink, and even after they render abject apologies and quivering obeisances, they're usually cancelled anyway; and,
  • neighborly civility and the willingness to interpret your fellow man's intentions as charitably as possible gets replaced by a hair-trigger for levying accusations of evil intentions, with a kind of frothing and shrieking intensity.

I'd help if I could figure out how, but there doesn't seem to be anything beneficial to do. So, I do my job, and teach my kids, and pray for peace.

I guess that's why it's a relief to hear Glenn Loury and John McWhorter just talking it over. It's how we humans are supposed to relate.
 
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I also agree that some of the things I have read lately are truly horrifying. Yet, in America one is (used to be) guaranteed the right to freedom of speech. This means that everyone from Joe Q Public to some organizations that I refuse to name as I cannot bring myself to type their names, can say what they want without fear of retribution.
Freedom of speech means that the government can make no laws against what someone says. It does not protect one from the public repercussions of stating an opinion that is controversial or even highly infuriating in some cases. In other words, it is fine to say whatever you want, and while the government cannot make a law against that right, the general public is free to boycott your business if they are put off by your s. Freedom of speech does not give anyone the right to say whatever they want and to expect people who disagree with them to just accept it. If you say something stupid you should be big enough to face the responses you are asking for.
 
What puzzles me is the zeal, and the extents some people go to, to silence differing opinions. The hallmark of a great society is to be able to hear both sides of issues.

"Freedom to be racist" is not a very sympathetic rallying cry to me. Yeah, people can be racist, but other people, or businesses, have the freedom to not want to associate with them. That's a different kind of freedom.
 
Freedom of speech means that the government can make no laws against what someone says. It does not protect one from the public repercussions of stating an opinion that is controversial or even highly infuriating in some cases.
True enough. Not having guns pointed at you is the minimum prerequisite for freedoms of various kinds.

But like I said in a previous post, if you want a Marketplace of Ideas -- which is, after all, the purpose for which "freedom of speech" exists -- then there has to remain some public forum to which you have access. If no Common Carrier is available, there should at least be an alternative Walled Garden in which you may run your business without interference from those who either disagree with you politically, or who're scampering to appease people who do.

What, then, do we do when there is no alternative Walled Garden, all the competitors having been swallowed up by whichever firm dominates the marketplace, and any startups being excluded by high barriers-to-entry? Where's the Marketplace of Ideas when there is no Common Carrier by which competing ideas may interact? And what happens if you give a firm the legal immunities normally accorded only to Common Carriers, but simultaneously give them the editorial exclusivity that is normally only granted to Content Creators and Curators?

I don't think the reach of the cancel culture is fully-appreciated by those who haven't yet been cancelled, or known someone who was.

Example:
Popular Schoolteacher X publicly and pointedly repeats and links to government-published information on a social media platform. His choice to repeat and link to it is, at worst, tone-deaf at the present time; but, he's not stating his own opinion; he's pointing out the government's data. There is a negative reaction to this post from a group of 150-odd alumni, who complain to the school. In response, Schoolteacher X gets fired.

So far, so good. A little extreme, perhaps, but not outside the bounds of "free speech."

However, Schoolteacher X has a kid that just came through extremely expensive lifesaving surgery. Not having a job, or health coverage, represents a real problem for the family. He puts out a GoFundMe ask for money for the kid's care and the outstanding balance of the surgery costs. Hundreds of thousands of dollars roll in from various folks who think he was treated shabbily (and anyway it isn't his kid's fault). But, not content with having gotten him fired, the angry alumni contact GoFundMe and lie about the original public statement they didn't like, and GoFundMe drops him so that his family can't get money for the kid. Meanwhile, the teacher has also written a book, available through a popular book-sales platform. The cancel culture also tries to get the book "cancelled."

It seems to me that GoFundMe, payment processing companies, online book retailers, etc. should function less like Walled Gardens and more like Common Carriers: Immune from liability for their use, but correspondingly not-allowed to reject customers.

After all, if I do something obnoxious as a business-owner, and it loses me customers; well, that's on me. But if I do something that might be obnoxious or might be courageously virtuous (depending on what opinions you hold on other topics), I do not think that it's right that I suddenly...
  • get my bank accounts frozen or closed;
  • get my credit cards cancelled;
  • get "swatted" by disguised calls to 911;
  • get ejected from job-application/networking sites;
  • get renounced by the institutions of learning from which I've graduated;
  • get all my published videos on unrelated topics deleted and/or demonetized;
  • lose the payment processing gateway account for my business's website;
  • get my accounts with internet advertising networks cancelled so that my site can no longer sell ad-space;
  • lose the front-end caching service that prevents my website from being DDOS-ed by determined attackers;
  • lose the ability for my friends to send me funds electronically, to help me in my plight;

...et cetera. Yet all of those stunts happen, to normal everyday people, pretty regularly, whenever the New Inquisitors decide to make an example of someone. I didn't just make that list up. I've seen different parts of it used against different folks, oh, fifty or sixty times in the last ten years.

As long as I live long enough to get my day in court, I'm not so concerned that the government will prosecute me for something I or a family member says. At least with a government, you can get a (hopefully) fair trial. You have a right to "petition for a redress of grievances."

Where does Schoolteacher X go, to petition the New Inquisitors for taking his bank account, his ability to take payments from customers, his ability to sell his books, his ability to keep his website running?

Sure, he has free speech. But, when he's sitting shivering in a dark house with the utilities turned off, who the hell's gonna hear him?
 
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"Freedom to be racist" is not a very sympathetic rallying cry to me.
Hey, me neither.

But that's presupposing facts not in evidence (at least, I haven't seen them). First you have to wait for the bad guy to actually be racist, before you can stop doing business with him, don't you? If the only thing that Fuller wrote was the excerpt I described in my earlier post, then maybe he isn't racist at all...in which case, calling him that is pretty freakin' unjust.

(I'm not arguing that he is, or isn't, the worst person on earth. I don't know. I don't know him. I don't know his motives, and I've only seen the one excerpt of what he said, and I don't even have all the context. So, maybe I should prescind from Fuller as an individual, and just say, in the abstract, all this "cancelling" is certainly premature if the thing someone's being cancelled for is something they aren't even guilty of!)

Yeah, people can be racist, but other people, or businesses, have the freedom to not want to associate with them.
Very True! ...up to a point.

But how far do you want to take that? Should the water company, the power company, the banks, private hospitals, the ISPs, the online-marketing platforms, etc., all decide to "cancel" you if you say something publicly that offends a constituency that they don't want to offend? (See my prior post to @Genghis for an example of where I'm going with this.)

I habitually lean Libertarian on these kinds of things myself. And if there were alternative platforms -- I mean really serious competitors, not some hole-in-the-wall near-beer that nobody's ever heard of -- to the popular social media sites, then they wouldn't have become the de facto public square for our civilization. (This is even more true in a pandemic when everyone's shut at home.)

As it is, our civilization's portal for random-access information just is Google, which is privately-owned. Same thing for Internet Advertising (Google Ads has 95% of the market). Same thing for video publishing (YouTube). Imagine if the Interstate Highway system were privately-owned? (I've shown sympathy for that idea before, BTW.) Maybe we'd get the same benefits, for less tax money...but, what if its owners wouldn't allow motorists to use their highways if they had "voiced wrongthink" -- or, perhaps, criticism of how a certain roadway was poorly-maintained -- on a social media platform? Imagine if the same owners also owned the funeral homes and the private hospitals? How free would your speech be if, by ticking off the wrong company, or even the wrong group of loudmouths that certain companies are trying to appease, you could be denied travel, internet service, and the ability to decently bury your recently-deceased parent?

To summarize: Normally, when the Fortune 500 aren't acting as an Orwellian Thought Police, I stick with the Libertarian rule-of-thumb that "free speech" means nothing more than a guarantee against speech-suppression by guys with guns. That's the normal rule-of thumb, for normal times.

But in a complex world like ours, there are exceptions. In our current cultural moment, we've now hit the upper-limit to this particular Libertarian rule-of-thumb, and the chief threat to free speech is from censorious anti-liberty persons manipulating the public square through the influence of the private firms that monopolize it.
 
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What puzzles me is the zeal, and the extents some people go to, to silence differing opinions. The hallmark of a great society is to be able to hear both sides of issues.

There's a big difference between silencing someone (which realistically only the government can do through use of the justice system) and voting with your wallet to condemn an abhorrent viewpoint. If nobody ever took a stand for or against something, nothing would ever change.
 
There's a big difference between silencing someone (which realistically only the government can do through use of the justice system) and voting with your wallet to condemn an abhorrent viewpoint. If nobody ever took a stand for or against something, nothing would ever change.

People are effectively being silenced by the mob now. E.g. influencers with moderate views pressured to be silent because their online followers are being harrassed. The culture of cancelling has been long established and is now truly powerful. The silent majority may as well be the minority if things keep heading in this direction.
 
Twitter is the death of reasonable discourse. Once you limit discourse and exchanges of ideas to 280 characters, gone are the nuanced explanations for positions.

They are replaced with interactions like the Zap!, Pow!, Thwak! balloons of the old Batman TV show as arguments and discourse. Arguments are no longer for understanding another's view of the world, but must be won like a pro wrestling match.

The need for revenge and retribution against perceived oppressors.

Like the quote attributed to Gandhi says, “An eye for an eye leaves the whole world blind”
 
Organized movements to destroy businesses, careers, and people who think "abhorrently" (i.e. disagree) are not "taking a stand". They're acting like jackboot brownshirts. I think Fuller is a dick, for reasons that have nothing to do with this instance. But the people trying to destroy his buisness, not because of his business practices or products, but because of his opinions. are far worse and far more dangerous.

After watching the news, then reading his posts, I agree with his bottom line, despite how he worded it. I guess some here would want me banned from the Forum for it. Cancel culture is not noble, it's cancer.

Seriously, when Paw Patrol is in the crosshairs, things have gotten totally of control.
 
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