The twitter censorship thing

I think the main problem is that too many Americans don’t get that democracy and capitalism are in direct opposition, and always will be. They’re permanently incompatible. Far too many seem to believe the two are natural fits, while some even believe the former can thrive when the latter is in place.

Economic apartheid (capitalism) will never support political democracy. It can’t. True democracy, if it were in place, would rightfully obliterate capitalism, and it’s hard to imagine that capitalists don’t get that, especially rich creeps like Musk. When capitalism is in place, democracy exists in name only, as a gadfly of sorts, with occasional victories and measures, here and there, but that’s it. Some nations, with Scandinavia likely leading the way, extend the range of the gadfly more than others, but in most cases the range is all too narrow and always precarious. With the exception of the all too brief Keynesian period (FDR thru LBJ, roughly), it’s been far worse than just precarious.

Social media allows “free speech” only to the extent that it helps generate capital accumulation. As in, only under its own rules, which means it doesn’t really exist there.

Another issue, of course, is the meaning of “free speech” itself. That is yet another scene of grotesque misunderstanding, even beyond the absurdities of assuming we’ll ever have “democratic rights” under capitalism.

Another key thing that goes unsaid all too often, even by leftists:

Our participation in social media extends (and makes far easier) the era of free content pillaging by capitalists. It’s yet another innovation in getting consumers to both buy stuff and work for free. We willingly provide intellectual property to capitalists for nada, and they add insult to injury by also plundering all the stuff we don’t volunteer: our personal meta-info. It’s yet another evolutionary step well beyond self-service gas-stations, etc.

As Jason Hickel describes so well in Less is More, capitalism was built on endless pillaging of formerly free externals, follows that with forced and artificial scarcity, and must continue this, world without end. It must always take far more than it gives. Social media provides one of its easiest routes to plunder, evah.

In short, leftists, IMO, should be investing in our own, democratically controlled media — to the extent possible. Thinking we can “democratize” Twitter is . . . . um, well, absurd. It’s not gonna happen. And until that happens, we need to find ways to use it, instead of being used by it.

I know. Easier said than done.

Billy_T wrote:

I think the main problem is that too many Americans don’t get that democracy and capitalism are in direct opposition, and always will be. They’re permanently incompatible. Far too many seem to believe the two are natural fits, while some even believe the former can thrive when the latter is in place.

I know some people who think capitalism and democracy are synonymous – two words that mean the same thing.  To reverse that, you’d have to overcome a century and a half of programming.  Programming that stresses individualistic “self-made” fallacies that people are immersed in not only at work, but at church, school, in the media – everywhere.

Not sure how you change that.  Certainly not at the voting booth.