The balance of two opposing forces—military-industrial surveillance capitalism and progressive cultural hegemony—once formed an equilibrium that gave the average Joe some options in life. That equilibrium was on its way out for a while, but it collapsed with the Capitol riots. The progressive camp has swallowed up it’s rival—or maybe the other way around. Anyway, who cares. Does the supposed direction of this absorption tell us much besides the team affiliation of the one supposing it?
We’re seeing the beginnings of what unambiguous power looks like. Corporate donors are dropping the GOP, throwing away an intimate, decades-long DD/lg relationship. But perhaps more important is the wave of unprecedented internet censorship that included the digital death penalty for Trump and his allies, and also for any users who continue to make claims of election fraud. This was seemingly coordinated among the entire now-private public square, and private companies are of course allowed to do whatever they want.
Average Joe might feel like he’s living on the edge of a knife. Don’t like it? Why not just create your own social media website that competes with Twitter in moderation policies? This is America, right?
But to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe. Here are the interconnecting layers of the internet that you’ll need to recreate yourself.
Build Your Own Website
Scattered across the infamy spectrum are a few attempts to Just Build Your Own Twitter. Building a website, in and of itself, is pretty easy these days, since there are open-source options that cost nothing and no-code services that can be bought. Both result in minimal technical work on your end.
Gab was founded in 2016 as a “free-speech” alternative to Twitter: the only content that’s restricted is content that violates the law. Because the only people who really benefit from a neutral content policy are culturally radioactive right-wingers, the user base quickly spiralled into a den of far-right villainy. Consequently, it was booted from the Google Play app store in 2017, and never made it onto the iOS App Store.
Parler, for reasons that escape me, tried the same thing as Gab but expected it to work. This Twitter-clone was founded in 2018 and was marketed to conservatives as a place free of partisan caprice. The typical user seems to be somewhat less racist than Gab: where Gab has Nazis, Parler has a few too many QAnon cultists.
In a shocking swerve, Parler was also booted from the two mobile app stores. So to build our own Twitter, we must go deeper down the stack.
Build Your Own Mobile OS and App Store
Eighty percent of Twitter’s users access the social network through the mobile app. Having an app on iOS and Android is pretty essential for something as app-ish as a social media platform. People demand them. Using a mobile browser is an option for an app, …read more
Via:: American Conservative
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