Brownstone Institute
Conservatives Cancel the Cancellers
From the Brownstone Institute
By
The irony is thick, given that some of those doing the cancelling are known for their prior staunch efforts to protect free speech, raising questions about whether some wish to protect free speech in principle or just the speech they agree with.
Calls for deportation of a comedy band over a failed joke and efforts to get ordinary working-class people sacked for saying terrible things out loud…
These are the kinds of actions one might expect from a progressive woke cancel culture mob, but in the wake of the failed assassination attempt on Donald Trump, it’s conservatives who have led the charge to cancel their political enemies over speech.
The irony is thick, given that some of those doing the cancelling are known for their prior staunch efforts to protect free speech, raising questions about whether some wish to protect free speech in principle or just the speech they agree with.
Assassination Joke Misfire
In Australia, a storm in teacup developed this week after a tasteless joke seeded clouds of discontent within conservative ‘freedom’ circles.
If you haven’t heard, Kyle Gass, of comedy band Tenacious D, quipped “Don’t miss Trump next time” as a 64th birthday wish while on stage in Sydney on Sunday night. It was in very poor taste, though the audience hooted and laughed.
Being that the duo is famous for taking irreverent silliness all the way to 11 on the dial, with antics like running on the beach in boxers and unitard in their cover of Chris Isaak’s ‘Wicked Game,’ and their peak silly song ‘Tribute’, you might expect a collective eye roll in response to Gass’s misstep.
But these are woke cancel culture times, defined by the dogged, humourless commitment to interpreting jokes as serious statements of intent, and the hysterical belief that words are tantamount to violence.
Gass’s bandmate Jack Black issued a formal apology and announced the cancellation of the band’s Australian tour. Gass soon apologised himself and has reportedly been dropped by his agency.
But that was not enough for upset Trump supporters Down Under, who enthusiastically called for Tenacious D’s deportation from the country.
“Tenacious D should be immediately removed from the country after wishing for the assassination of Donald Trump at their Sydney concert,” said Senator Ralph Babet of the United Australia Party in a statement, viewed over four million times on X.
“This was not a joke, he was deadly serious when he wished for the death of the President…Anything less than deportation is an endorsement of the shooting and attempted assassination of Donald J Trump, the 45th and soon-to-be 47th President of the United States,” he said.
Senator Babet reasoned that as Australia had wrongly deported Novak Djokovic in 2022 over his anti-Covid vaccination views, we should now also deport Tenacious D.
“Australia wrongly locked up Novak Djokovic and deported him because he allegedly undermined public trust in vaccination. Allowing Tenacious D to remain in Australia after calling for the death of a President is unthinkable, and it affirms the weakness of our current Prime Minister,” Senator Babet said.
Commenters praised Senator Babet for his “leadership.”
Left-wing news site Crikey was quick to point out the apparent double standard:
This is the same senator who in April refused to take down graphic footage of the attack on Bishop Mar Mari Emmanuel from his X account because: “Without free speech our nation will fall.” Late last year the senator sent Communications Minister Michelle Rowland 152 “postcard-style” submissions regarding the draft Combatting Misinformation and Disinformation Bill “on behalf of members of the public”, like the following:
Simon Collins of the West Australian similarly called out the hypocrisy of “blowhards” calling for Tenacious D’s cancellation and deportation, people who at the same time “proclaim to be advocates for free speech.” That said, Collins failed to mention the central role he allegedly played in getting Perth comedian Corey White’s run of shows cancelled at the 2021 Fringe Festival over an offensive joke.
Raising the hypocrisy stakes even higher, conservative influencer Chaya Raichick used her ‘Libs of TikTok’ platform (with over 3.2 million followers on X) to doxx minimum-wage workers and get them fired for wishing the Trump shooter, Thomas Matthew Crooks, had aimed better.
Raichick boasted on her Substack,
In fact, because of Libs of TikTok, TEN DERANGED LEFTISTS have already been FIRED from their jobs because we showed the world that they support murdering President Trump.
It is uncertain how many of these ten were public figures, but at least some of those fired are reported to be ordinary working-class Americans, including Home Depot worker Darcy Waldron Pinckney, who ill-advisedly posted to Facebook, “To [sic] bad they weren’t a better shooter!!!!!”
This effort has been enthusiastically supported by Riachick’s followers. “We got another one!” posted one commenter under a post doxxing a New Jersey Education Association employee for expressing her disappointment on social media that the shooter missed.
Yet, Raichick and her supporters previously complained loudly when Washington Post journalist Taylor Lorenz doxxed her, with Raichick calling Lorenz’s actions “abhorrent.”
Protected Speech Vs. Incitement to Violence
In the US and Australia, as in most Western liberal democracies, free speech is protected. The US has robust speech protections under the First Amendment, while Australia has the less robust implied freedom of political communication.
However, where speech causes, or is likely to cause harm, governments put legal limitations on speech rights. While the proliferation of hate speech and online harm bills is a testament to the ballooning definition of harm in Western academia and policymaking, incitement of physical violence is a foundational interpretation of the limit to free speech.
In both Australia and the US, speech that incites someone to commit a crime of violence is against the law, and in the US it is a felony to threaten the life of a president.
But not all statements expressing a wish for harm are a ‘true threat.’ In a 1971 interview with Flash Magazine, Groucho Marx quipped, “I think the only hope this country has is Nixon’s assassination,” but he was not arrested.
In contrast, David Hilliard of the Black Panther Party was charged in 1969 – and then acquitted in 1971 – for stating publicly before a crowd that President Nixon was “responsible for all the attacks on the Black Panther Party nationally,” adding “We will kill Richard Nixon.”
Asked to explain the different treatment of the two cases despite the similar rhetoric used by Marx and Hilliard, US Attorney James L. Browning, Jr. responded,
It is one thing to say that “I (or we) will kill Richard Nixon” when you are the leader of an organization which advocates killing people and overthrowing the Government; it is quite another to utter the words which are attributed to Mr. Marx, an alleged comedian. It was the opinion of both myself and the United States Attorney in Los Angeles (where Marx’s words were alleged to have been uttered) that the latter utterance did not constitute a “true” threat.
In other words, context matters.
Bad jokes or incitement?
Conservatives going after people wishing that the Trump assassination attempt had been successful, whether joking or otherwise, claim that their comments are “call[s] to political violence,” to use Senator Babet’s phrase.
But jokes like Gass’s birthday wish wouldn’t meet the legal threshold for incitement to violence, says James Allan, Professor of Law at the University of Queensland.
“A reasonable person would have to understand it as actually trying to incite violence,” Professor Allan told me. “I think he was just being a virtue-signalling leftie. I don’t think he actually intended to counsel violence, and I suspect most people wouldn’t take it that way.”
Dr Reuben Kirkham of the Free Speech Union of Australia (FSU) agrees that Gass’s joke would not qualify as incitement under the law in New South Wales, where Gass said the bad thing.
“Outside of incitement provisions focussed on specific protected characteristics, the person must intend that the offence be committed. A joke at a comedy event is unlikely to meet this standard, let alone to the ‘reasonable doubt’ standard,” Dr Kirkham said, echoing Professor Allan. “It might be in poor taste, but taste is thankfully not something that the law polices,” he added.
But Tony Nikolic, Director of Sydney law firm Ashley, Francina, Leonard & Associates told me he believes that Gass’s comment was “clear-cut incitement and should be called out.”
“Free expression is a cornerstone of democracy. However, rhetoric that crosses into inciting violence or hatred can have dangerous consequences,” Nikolic said. “We have laws to address that in Australia and they should have been used to indict the offender.”
Conservative Game Theory
Professor Allan said that while he doesn’t think prosecution or deportation is appropriate in Gass’s case, there are social consequences for saying “idiotic things” from a public platform.
“I definitely wouldn’t support [Gass]. His agent has dropped him. People don’t have to associate with people who say idiotic things. If he came out with a grovelling apology…I’d be inclined to say, OK, fine.”
Nevertheless, he warned that cancel culture writ large is not a good strategy for anyone who truly values protecting free speech.
“The problem is you go down the cancel culture route and you become as bad as the other side,” Professor Allan said. “I understand that there’s a certain sort of game theory element, that if they do it to us, we need to do it back to them, and in some areas I agree with that.
“But with speech, it is better not to play the cancel game. The other side reveals how they actually think. We want to know that. We should fight against our views being cancelled and fight hard, but not make the error of cancelling theirs. The more they talk, the more people can see the insipid, doctrinaire foundations to their views.”
Others disagree.
In an article called ‘In Defense of Cancel Culture’ in the American Spectator this week, Nate Hochman argued that the right should adopt a new, much more aggressive strategy in dealing with its political opponents: mutually assured destruction (MAD).
Hochman’s thesis is essentially that the left has debased the political discourse to such a degree that playing nice and principled is a losing game. Instead, he counsels “a short-term escalation to force a long-term de-escalation.”
This means punishing progressives for their bad behaviour in the same way that they have done to conservatives until they understand, “at a visceral level, the penalties for the system that they themselves constructed.” He reminds readers that roughly half of Democrats wanted to fine and imprison unvaccinated Americans in 2022 (in the US, Covid vaccination is a highly partisan issue).
Once progressives feel that the negatives of the cancel culture they’ve fostered outweigh the positives, said Hochman, “then, and only then, will the incentives truly change.”
Commentators in the blogosphere and on social media have offered similarly revanchist takes.
“No one wants to live a world characterized by (metaphorical) nuclear exchanges, but nuclear exchanges, once they become part of the universe of discourse, and [sic] held off only by deterrence, not decency,” wrote author Devon Erikson on X.
Pseudonymous Substacker John Carter catalogued a selection of such nuclear exchanges, including this “short list of how “Turn the other cheek” absolutely didn’t moderate the Left.”
“The left has been absolutely ruthless and relentless in its pursuit of total monolithic discursive purity,” he inveighed, suggesting that so long as conservatives are surgical in their use of political violence to achieve their goal – “ending leftist violence” – all will be well. “We can be magnanimous after victory.”
Doxxing Ordinary People Puts Harm in ‘Digital Granite’
Free speech purists will find the MAD strategy a hard pill to swallow – especially those who have paid a price to take a principled stand against cancel culture.
Former corporate journalist Alison Bevege is one of these people.
In 2020, during the first year of the Covid pandemic, Bevege was asked to work on an article on ‘Bunnings Karen,’ after footage circulated online of an unmasked woman arguing with Bunnings staff over her refusal to wear a mask inside.
But then, “it wasn’t enough just to kind of shame Bunnings Karen – they wanted me to find out her name, to try to find her on social media. And I didn’t want to do that,” Bevege told me, explaining that there should be a distinction between how we dole out social consequences to public figures and how we deal with private citizens. She left the Daily Mail soon after.
“You know, cancel culture has two components. One component is the shaming of the act, where you might share the video of some stupid thing that someone did, and everyone can laugh at it. I don’t really have a problem with that. That’s part of how we reinforce social norms,” said Bevege.
“But it’s the second part of cancel culture that I don’t like. And that is when you try to make that person really suffer by, for example, trying to get them to lose their job or trying to make it stick to them forever in a permanent way, like trying to damage someone with it.”
Bevege, who now publishes on her own Substack, Letters From Australia, and drives buses, gave the example of a prospective employer googling the name of a person who’s been shamed online.
“When you have a member of the public, you don’t know if that person’s had a bad day, if they’re mentally ill, if they’ve just lost their parents, if they’re drunk or on drugs. But when you name someone online it’s in digital granite. It’s there forever, and can really affect their lives.”
This is where Bevege draws the line. In MAD game theory though, this is the acceptable cost of “ending leftist violence,” if the victim is a Home Depot worker wishing for a successful presidential assassination.
Deportation Should Not Be Used for Censorship of Debate
In the case of public figures like Gass doing dumb things on stage, Bevege said people should by all means “rip the shit out of him…and don’t go to a show,” but that deportation would be “ridiculous.”
“I like Senator Babet because he’s really stood up for the vaccine injured. But we’ve got to stop deporting and banning people for speech,” said Bevege, recalling the time polarising UK personality Katie Hopkins was deported from Australia for joking online about planning to breach Covid quarantine rules and for describing the lockdown as a “hoax.”
Nikolic and Dr Kirkham also raised concerns over migration laws being used as a tool for censorship. Nikolic has been a vocal critic of the conservative Australian Government’s deportation of star tennis player Novak Djokovic in January 2022 for his anti-Covid vaccination views. And, Dr Kirkham pointed to the delay of Irish women’s rights and gender critical activist Graham Linehan’s visa application earlier this year while Australian authorities conducted a “character assessment,” despite Linehan having no criminal record.
“Freedom of speech exists for the views that you don’t like, and you have to tolerate those views,” said Bevege.
Unfortunately, an increasing number of conservatives seem to be running short of tolerance.
Republished from the author’s Substack
From the Brownstone Institute
How will he organize the “deportation” of illegal migrants? In the best case, it will be difficult. There will be scuffles and chases. Critics will charge the new Administration as cruel and worse. How much stomach will Republicans have for a messy process?
Trump enjoys the momentum. Four of the most recent major national polls show him up 2 to 3%, while Democratic-friendly outlets like the New York Times and CNN both show a TIE race in their final surveys. The 2016 and 2020 elections were razor close even though Clinton (5%) and Biden (8%) had solid polling leads at this point. We need to contemplate a Trump win not only in the electoral college but also in the popular vote.
Here are some thoughts:
- JD Vance ascendant, obviously. Big implications for the Republican trajectory.
- Will Trump replace Fed chairman Jay Powell? Or merely jawbone for a change in policy? In a new CNBC interview, former Fed governor Kevin Warsh argues that the Fed has juiced both the stock market and inflation. Would reducing inflation, which Trump has promised, automatically therefore lead to a stock market correction and economic slowdown? Not necessarily. If Trump unleashes productive economic activity and Congress ends the fiscal blowout, the Fed could normalize monetary policy without causing a major economic slump.
- Will Trump impose the broad and deep tariffs he proposed? Or will he mostly threaten them as a bargaining tool with China? I’m betting on some of the former but more of the latter. We notice, however, Trump allies are floating a trial balloon to replace income taxes with tariffs. As impractical and improbable as that may be, we’re glad to see the mention of radical tax reform reemerge after too long an absence from the national discussion.
- How will he organize the “deportation” of illegal migrants? In the best case, it will be difficult. There will be scuffles and chases. Critics will charge the new Administration as cruel and worse. How much stomach will Republicans have for a messy process? One idea would be to offer a “reverse amnesty” – if you leave peacefully and agree not to return illegally, we will forgive your previous illegal entry(s) and minor violations. This would incentivize self-identification and quiet departure. Plus it would help authorities track those leaving. Would migrant departures truly hit the economy, as critics charge? We doubt large effects. Substantial native populations are still underemployed or absent from the workforce.
- We should expect a major retrenchment of regulatory intrusions across the economy – from energy to crypto. Combined with recent Supreme Court action, such as the Chevron reversal, and assisted by the Elon Musk’s substance and narrative, it could be a regulatory renaissance. Extension of the 2017 tax cuts also becomes far more likely.
- Trump has never worried much about debt, deficits, or spending. But he’s tapped Elon Musk as government efficiency czar. It’s an orthogonal approach to spending reform instead of the traditional (and unsuccessful) Paul Ryan playbook. Can this good cop-bad cop duo at the very least return out-of-control outlays to a pre-Covid path? Can they at least cancel purely kleptocratic programs, such as the $370-billion Green Energy slush funds? Might they go even further – leveraging the unpopular spending explosion and resulting inflation to achieve more revolutionary effects on government spending and reach? Or will the powerful and perennial forces of government expansion win yet again, sustaining a one-way ratchet not even Elon can defeat?
- What if the economy turns south? One catalyst might be the gigantic unrealized bond losses on bank balance sheets; another might be commercial real estate collapse. Although reported GDP growth has been okay, the inflation hangover is helping Trump win on the economy. But many believe the post-pandemic economic expansion is merely a sugar-high and has already lasted longer than expected. A downturn early in Trump’s term could complicate many of his plans.
- How will NATO and its transatlantic network respond? Or more generally, what will the neocon and neoliberal hawks, concentrated in DC and the media, but little loved otherwise, do? Does this item from Anne Applebaum — arguing Trump resembles Hitler, Mussolini, and Stalin all rolled into one — portend continued all-out war on prudent foreign policy? Or will they adopt a more sophisticated approach? If the neocons move wholesale and formally (back) into the Democratic fold, how long will the coalition of wokes and militarists hold? On the economic front, Europe, already underperforming vis-a-vis the US, will fall even further behind without big changes. Reformers should gain at the expense of the transatlantic WEF-style bureaucrats.
- Can Trump avoid another internal sabotage of his Administration? Before then, if the election results are tight, will the Democrats seek to complicate or even block his inauguration? Can he win approval for his appointees in the Senate? Can he clean house across the vast public agencies? How long will it take to recruit, train, and reinvigorate talented military leadership, which we chased away in recent years? And how will Trump counter – and avoid overreacting to – taunts, riots, unrest, and lawfare, designed to bolster the case he’s an authoritarian?
- Will the Democrats reorient toward the center, a la Bill Clinton? Or will the blinding hatred of Trump fuel yet more radicalism? Orthodox political thinking suggests a moderation. Especially if Trump wins the popular vote, or comes close, pragmatic Democrats will counsel a reformation. James Carville, for example, already complains that his party careened recklessly away from male voters. And Trump’s apparent pickups among Black and Latino voters complicate the Democrats’ longstanding identity-focused strategy. Other incentives might push toward continued belligerence and extreme wokeness, however, and thus an intra-party war.
- Will the half of the country which inexplicably retains any confidence in the legacy media at least begin rethinking its information diet and filters? Or has the infowarp inflicted permanent damage?
- Will big business, which shifted hard toward Democrats over the last 15 years, recalibrate toward the GOP? Parts of Silicon Valley over the last year began a reorientation — e.g. Elon Musk, Marc Andreessen, David Sacks, and before them, Peter Thiel in 2016. But those are the entrepreneurs. In the receding past, businesses large and small generally lined up against government overreach. Then Big Business and Big Government merged. Now, a chief divide is between politically-enmeshed bureaucratic businesses and entrepreneurial ones. Does the GOP even want many of the big guys back? The GOP’s new alignment with “Little Tech” is an exciting development, especially after being shut out of Silicon Valley for the last two decades.
- Industry winners: traditional energy, nuclear energy, Little Tech. Industry losers: Green Energy, Big Tech, Big Pharma, Big Food. Individual winners: X (nee Twitter), Elon Musk, RFK, Jr.
- How will the Censorship Industrial Complex react? A Trump win will pose both a symbolic and operational blow to governmental, non-governmental, old media, and new media outlets determined to craft and control facts and narratives. It will complicate their mission, funding, and organizational web. Will they persist in their “mis/disinformation” framing and their badgering of old media and social media companies to moderate content aggressively? Or will they devise a new strategy? A.I. is pretty clearly the next frontier in the information wars. How will those who propagandize and rewire human minds attempt to program and prewire artificial ones?
- How will Trump integrate RFK, Jr. and his movement? Will RFK, Jr. achieve real influence, especially on health issues? Big Pharma and Big Public Health will wage a holy war to block reforms in general and accountability for Covid mistakes in particular.
- Trump has promised to end the war between Russia and Ukraine. On one hand, it should be easy. Despite what you hear from DC media and think tanks, Ukraine is losing badly. Hundreds of thousands are dead, and its military is depleted and faltering. Ukraine should want a deal quickly, before it loses yet more people and territory. Russia, meanwhile, always said it wants a deal, even before the war started, focusing on Ukrainian neutrality. Why Ukrainian neutrality should bother the US was always a mystery. And yet even critics of the West’s support for Ukraine, who want an agreement, think it will be difficult to achieve. The Western foreign policy establishment has invested too much credibility and emotion. It will charge “appeasement” and “betrayal” and make any deal difficult for Trump. Russia, meanwhile, has secured so much territory and now has Odessa and Kharkiv in its sights. Putin will not be eager to accept a deal he would have taken in 2021 or before. The far better path for all involved was a pre-war agreement, or the one negotiated but scuttled in April 2022.
- What if A.I. launches a new productivity boom, enabled by an agenda of energy abundance, including a nuclear power revival? The economic tailwinds could remake politics even more than we currently see.
- Can Trump, having run and won his last campaign, consolidate gains by reaching out and uniting the portions of the country willing to take an extended hand?
Republished from the author’s Substack
Author
From the Brownstone Institute
For the first time in 30 years, we have gone a long swath of time – since October 8-10 – since this service has chronicled the life of the Internet in real time.
Instances of censorship are growing to the point of normalization. Despite ongoing litigation and more public attention, mainstream social media has been more ferocious in recent months than ever before. Podcasters know for sure what will be instantly deleted and debate among themselves over content in gray areas. Some like Brownstone have given up on YouTube in favor of Rumble, sacrificing vast audiences if only to see their content survive to see the light of day.
It’s not always about being censored or not. Today’s algorithms include a range of tools that affect searchability and findability. For example, the Joe Rogan interview with Donald Trump racked up an astonishing 34 million views before YouTube and Google tweaked their search engines to make it hard to discover, while even presiding over a technical malfunction that disabled viewing for many people. Faced with this, Rogan went to the platform X to post all three hours.
Navigating this thicket of censorship and quasi-censorship has become part of the business model of alternative media.
Those are just the headline cases. Beneath the headlines, there are technical events taking place that are fundamentally affecting the ability of any historian even to look back and tell what is happening. Incredibly, the service Archive.org which has been around since 1994 has stopped taking images of content on all platforms. For the first time in 30 years, we have gone a long swath of time – since October 8-10 – since this service has chronicled the life of the Internet in real time.
As of this writing, we have no way to verify content that has been posted for three weeks of October leading to the days of the most contentious and consequential election of our lifetimes. Crucially, this is not about partisanship or ideological discrimination. No websites on the Internet are being archived in ways that are available to users. In effect, the whole memory of our main information system is just a big black hole right now.
The trouble on Archive.org began on October 8, 2024, when the service was suddenly hit with a massive Denial of Service attack (DDOS) that not only took down the service but introduced a level of failure that nearly took it out completely. Working around the clock, Archive.org came back as a read-only service where it stands today. However, you can only read content that was posted before the attack. The service has yet to resume any public display of mirroring of any sites on the Internet.
In other words, the only source on the entire World Wide Web that mirrors content in real time has been disabled. For the first time since the invention of the web browser itself, researchers have been robbed of the ability to compare past with future content, an action that is a staple of researchers looking into government and corporate actions.
It was using this service, for example, that enabled Brownstone researchers to discover precisely what the CDC had said about Plexiglas, filtration systems, mail-in ballots, and rental moratoriums. That content was all later scrubbed off the live Internet, so accessing archive copies was the only way we could know and verify what was true. It was the same with the World Health Organization and its disparagement of natural immunity which was later changed. We were able to document the shifting definitions thanks only to this tool which is now disabled.
What this means is the following: Any website can post anything today and take it down tomorrow and leave no record of what they posted unless some user somewhere happened to take a screenshot. Even then there is no way to verify its authenticity. The standard approach to know who said what and when is now gone. That is to say that the whole Internet is already being censored in real time so that during these crucial weeks, when vast swaths of the public fully expect foul play, anyone in the information industry can get away with anything and not get caught.
We know what you are thinking. Surely this DDOS attack was not a coincidence. The time was just too perfect. And maybe that is right. We just do not know. Does Archive.org suspect something along those lines? Here is what they say:
Last week, along with a DDOS attack and exposure of patron email addresses and encrypted passwords, the Internet Archive’s website javascript was defaced, leading us to bring the site down to access and improve our security. The stored data of the Internet Archive is safe and we are working on resuming services safely. This new reality requires heightened attention to cyber security and we are responding. We apologize for the impact of these library services being unavailable.
Deep state? As with all these things, there is no way to know, but the effort to blast away the ability of the Internet to have a verified history fits neatly into the stakeholder model of information distribution that has clearly been prioritized on a global level. The Declaration of the Future of the Internet makes that very clear: the Internet should be “governed through the multi-stakeholder approach, whereby governments and relevant authorities partner with academics, civil society, the private sector, technical community and others.” All of these stakeholders benefit from the ability to act online without leaving a trace.
To be sure, a librarian at Archive.org has written that “While the Wayback Machine has been in read-only mode, web crawling and archiving have continued. Those materials will be available via the Wayback Machine as services are secured.”
When? We do not know. Before the election? In five years? There might be some technical reasons but it might seem that if web crawling is continuing behind the scenes, as the note suggests, that too could be available in read-only mode now. It is not.
Disturbingly, this erasure of Internet memory is happening in more than one place. For many years, Google offered a cached version of the link you were seeking just below the live version. They have plenty of server space to enable that now, but no: that service is now completely gone. In fact, the Google cache service officially ended just a week or two before the Archive.org crash, at the end of September 2024.
Thus the two available tools for searching cached pages on the Internet disappeared within weeks of each other and within weeks of the November 5th election.
Other disturbing trends are also turning Internet search results increasingly into AI-controlled lists of establishment-approved narratives. The web standard used to be for search result rankings to be governed by user behavior, links, citations, and so forth. These were more or less organic metrics, based on an aggregation of data indicating how useful a search result was to Internet users. Put very simply, the more people found a search result useful, the higher it would rank. Google now uses very different metrics to rank search results, including what it considers “trusted sources” and other opaque, subjective determinations.
Furthermore, the most widely used service that once ranked websites based on traffic is now gone. That service was called Alexa. The company that created it was independent. Then one day in 1999, it was bought by Amazon. That seemed encouraging because Amazon was well-heeled. The acquisition seemed to codify the tool that everyone was using as a kind of metric of status on the web. It was common back in the day to take note of an article somewhere on the web and then look it up on Alexa to see its reach. If it was important, one would take notice, but if it was not, no one particularly cared.
This is how an entire generation of web technicians functioned. The system worked as well as one could possibly expect.
Then, in 2014, years after acquiring the ranking service Alexa, Amazon did a strange thing. It released its home assistant (and surveillance device) with the same name. Suddenly, everyone had them in their homes and would find out anything by saying “Hey Alexa.” Something seemed strange about Amazon naming its new product after an unrelated business it had acquired years earlier. No doubt there was some confusion caused by the naming overlap.
Here’s what happened next. In 2022, Amazon actively took down the web ranking tool. It didn’t sell it. It didn’t raise the prices. It didn’t do anything with it. It suddenly made it go completely dark.
No one could figure out why. It was the industry standard, and suddenly it was gone. Not sold, just blasted away. No longer could anyone figure out the traffic-based website rankings of anything without paying very high prices for hard-to-use proprietary products.
All of these data points that might seem unrelated when considered individually, are actually part of a long trajectory that has shifted our information landscape into unrecognizable territory. The Covid events of 2020-2023, with massive global censorship and propaganda efforts, greatly accelerated these trends.
One wonders if anyone will remember what it was once like. The hacking and hobbling of Archive.org underscores the point: there will be no more memory.
As of this writing, fully three weeks of web content have not been archived. What we are missing and what has changed is anyone’s guess. And we have no idea when the service will come back. It is entirely possible that it will not come back, that the only real history to which we can take recourse will be pre-October 8, 2024, the date on which everything changed.
The Internet was founded to be free and democratic. It will require herculean efforts at this point to restore that vision, because something else is quickly replacing it.
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