Dearest readers, only once in the entire history of my blog have I actually seriously considered angrily declaring that my blog is not a democracy and shutting down the comments section. :p This is why I understand the urge to do so. However, not all urges are there for us to act on all the time, and some are better left ignored. However, the censorship that has been going on left and right (pun intended haha) is becoming both very obvious even to everyday people and also very confusing, not to mention at times infuriating. By infuriating, I mean any time censorship happens based on often arbitrary rules and always unwritten laws. By confusing, I mean that people get confused and angry over the symptoms of censorship without learning about or dealing with the real cause of it. So, let us look at the real cause of it, the mechanics of that cause and why we should have a huge problem with it- All of Us.
The mechanics of the real cause of censorship is what some people call the "adpocalypse". A combination of the words advertisement (ad) and apocalypse, it refers to a wave of panicky decisions that YouTube (most famously, although other platforms have done it too) has made over the last 5-7 years or so. There were four adpocalypse events, out of which the second one is perhaps the craziest. In the second adpocalypse, some YouTube content creators exploited at the time lax kids' content rules and oversight and created kids videos that were monstrous combinations of all sorts of different content that was trending on YouTube, lots of it being adult themed. Some examples I heard about was a children's song playing while the animated Hulk and Hitler were dancing and so forth. As parents often let kids' content autoplay, one automated suggestion after another, it took a while for people to catch on and cause an uproar against YouTube; all the while, these algorithmic abomination channels grew like crazy and I believe they got monetized as well and made off like bandits. Crazy and then some, right? So, they fixed it and what is the big deal then? Well, every time a scandal like that happened, major corporations that have taken over YouTube's (and Google's in general) ad space have threatened to pull their ads completely off of YouTube unless they lock things down more. The corporations' actions were so severe that, after every adpocalypse, Google started playing Minority Report by trying to guess what corporations may freak out about next; in the process, they have gone, and I am sorry, but downright psychotically neurotic. It is as if corporations were a gang and told YouTube to kill a single random person for their gang initiation, and then Google goes and blows up a country. To us, variably impressionable users of Google's platforms, this constitutes significant influence and makes us think that this kind of behavior is ok in our everyday lives as well. This mechanic keeps happening again and again and again and it keeps spreading across the online world that is increasingly influencing our offline world interactions.
So, censorship is coming to us from corporations that use their gigantic advertising budgets as a weapon some days, and a tool other days. They do so through social media platforms that are powered by and large by advertising money that these corporations spend with them. Apple is the largest single advertiser on YouTube, while Disney is the largest single advertiser on Facebook. Smaller advertisers such as forex platforms, mom and pop shops, t-shirt campaigns and dropshippers do not care about what content their ads show up in or next to, because logic dictates that even people who consume flat Earth content or Russian dashcam footage compilations may also want to buy a t-shirt, trade forex or buy a cool gadget shipped from China. This is the narrative that large corporations seem to want to destroy, the narrative of individual choice as long as it can peacefully coexist, though in healthy competition, with other individual choices. They want us to choose what they choose, and they want us to be afraid of choosing anything new without asking them first. Worst of all, they are normalizing fear of the unknown in the Internet generations and this will stunt the growth and development in the developed world. Put simply, the corporations are stuck in the past where centralization with one narrative, three TV and 4 radio stations as well as one powerful newspaper company was an amazing way to tell the rabble what to think, before and after schools tell us how to think. Cohesion is important in every society, but cohesion can never mean the same as single-think.
Worst of all, corporations are trying to hold back the next greatest revolution that they are very, very afraid of- the Great Decentralization or the Great Escape. Dearest readers, I really feel we are entering a chaotic period where we will move from centralized to highly decentralized societies. Cryptocurrencies, rise of remote work and telecommuting, competition on the global scale, cheap access to huge amounts of information, data and education to more people than ever before, as well as ideological decentralization will allow many people to truly go their own way. Many inefficiencies of the past will disappear and hopefully, before we implode, we will find a way to achieve cohesive decentralization or decentralized cohesion- you pick which one sounds better but it is coming.
In such a world, large corporations are afraid that they will not be able to appeal to anyone if they try to appeal to everyone. Well, in that case, they will have to go back to appealing to us on the uniqueness, solutions and quality of their products and services and leave appeal on a personal level alone. I mean, leave our personhood alone because that is our domain, not theirs.
The mechanics of the real cause of censorship is what some people call the "adpocalypse". A combination of the words advertisement (ad) and apocalypse, it refers to a wave of panicky decisions that YouTube (most famously, although other platforms have done it too) has made over the last 5-7 years or so. There were four adpocalypse events, out of which the second one is perhaps the craziest. In the second adpocalypse, some YouTube content creators exploited at the time lax kids' content rules and oversight and created kids videos that were monstrous combinations of all sorts of different content that was trending on YouTube, lots of it being adult themed. Some examples I heard about was a children's song playing while the animated Hulk and Hitler were dancing and so forth. As parents often let kids' content autoplay, one automated suggestion after another, it took a while for people to catch on and cause an uproar against YouTube; all the while, these algorithmic abomination channels grew like crazy and I believe they got monetized as well and made off like bandits. Crazy and then some, right? So, they fixed it and what is the big deal then? Well, every time a scandal like that happened, major corporations that have taken over YouTube's (and Google's in general) ad space have threatened to pull their ads completely off of YouTube unless they lock things down more. The corporations' actions were so severe that, after every adpocalypse, Google started playing Minority Report by trying to guess what corporations may freak out about next; in the process, they have gone, and I am sorry, but downright psychotically neurotic. It is as if corporations were a gang and told YouTube to kill a single random person for their gang initiation, and then Google goes and blows up a country. To us, variably impressionable users of Google's platforms, this constitutes significant influence and makes us think that this kind of behavior is ok in our everyday lives as well. This mechanic keeps happening again and again and again and it keeps spreading across the online world that is increasingly influencing our offline world interactions.
So, censorship is coming to us from corporations that use their gigantic advertising budgets as a weapon some days, and a tool other days. They do so through social media platforms that are powered by and large by advertising money that these corporations spend with them. Apple is the largest single advertiser on YouTube, while Disney is the largest single advertiser on Facebook. Smaller advertisers such as forex platforms, mom and pop shops, t-shirt campaigns and dropshippers do not care about what content their ads show up in or next to, because logic dictates that even people who consume flat Earth content or Russian dashcam footage compilations may also want to buy a t-shirt, trade forex or buy a cool gadget shipped from China. This is the narrative that large corporations seem to want to destroy, the narrative of individual choice as long as it can peacefully coexist, though in healthy competition, with other individual choices. They want us to choose what they choose, and they want us to be afraid of choosing anything new without asking them first. Worst of all, they are normalizing fear of the unknown in the Internet generations and this will stunt the growth and development in the developed world. Put simply, the corporations are stuck in the past where centralization with one narrative, three TV and 4 radio stations as well as one powerful newspaper company was an amazing way to tell the rabble what to think, before and after schools tell us how to think. Cohesion is important in every society, but cohesion can never mean the same as single-think.
Worst of all, corporations are trying to hold back the next greatest revolution that they are very, very afraid of- the Great Decentralization or the Great Escape. Dearest readers, I really feel we are entering a chaotic period where we will move from centralized to highly decentralized societies. Cryptocurrencies, rise of remote work and telecommuting, competition on the global scale, cheap access to huge amounts of information, data and education to more people than ever before, as well as ideological decentralization will allow many people to truly go their own way. Many inefficiencies of the past will disappear and hopefully, before we implode, we will find a way to achieve cohesive decentralization or decentralized cohesion- you pick which one sounds better but it is coming.
In such a world, large corporations are afraid that they will not be able to appeal to anyone if they try to appeal to everyone. Well, in that case, they will have to go back to appealing to us on the uniqueness, solutions and quality of their products and services and leave appeal on a personal level alone. I mean, leave our personhood alone because that is our domain, not theirs.