Clearnet is coming to an end because social media is too dangerous to the official narratives. The West, which long contrasted itself favorably to autocratic states, now embraces their methods. The post-Trump, post-Covid establishment takeover of the Internet has recently culminated in draconian laws in various countries that are now being turned into policy and enforced.
I speculate the age verification regime for pornography sites will be adapted as ID regimes for social media, and eventually for posting anything on Clearnet. Under the hood, backbone providers and DDOS protection services like Cloudflare will be even more willing to do the bidding of their political masters, keeping "bad" content offline. They're going to squeeze and squeeze until everything they don't like has disappeared from Clearnet. If you think states can't do this, look what a handful of angry transgender people did to Kiwifarms over the past few years without state support:Over the past year, their little group of internet sleuths, trans engineers and activists has methodically chased Kiwi Farms across servers and networks around the globe, successively persuading more than two dozen companies to drop the site. The fact Kiwifarms persists is being used to psychologically prepare the public for even more draconian policies:The group’s Sisyphean battle illustrates the lack of mechanisms for reporting online abuse, much less for banishing harmful content. It also raises serious doubts about society’s ability to block any site from the global web — even one that explicitly incites violence. [...]
“Deciding what isn’t allowed is the job of governments and regulators, not ISPs and network providers,” [Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince] said via the messaging app Signal. Still, he added, “I don’t miss having to worry about [Kiwi Farms] and their often vile content.” But with or without new laws and policies, the activists believe it's eventually over for Kiwifarms:It’s true Kiwi Farms keeps finding more providers, she said. But “it’s a finite list. And this is why we know we’re going to win.”
BoyChat was probably the first canary in the Internet coal mine, proving that free speech in America died in 1998. Kiwifarms is the second canary, and it's disappearance will establish a new age of online censorship. And when the canaries are all gone, what then? Sadly, the web3 crypto dev culture that has had a head start for more than a decade hasn't produced anything worth talking about.
The norms that have enabled Free Spirits resources to coast under the radar for the past 15 years may be coming to an end. Either these services will disappear forever, or something new will have to be devised to replace them. Of course, nothing lasts forever: "On a long enough time line, the survival rate for any service drops to zero." Only it may not be as far away as you think. | This Space Reserved For Less Important Thoughts |
