The battle against the woke technocracy is at an early stage and will require a long-term, multi-faceted digital guerilla marketing approach.
Even though we stipulate to the fact they have every right to be arrogant SOB’s within their platforms, while making outlandish claims of not being woke authoritarians, and even though we don’t necessarily think they outright want to ban all content that doesn’t agree with woke authoritarianism, we can’t warm up to these people. They are unlikeable in their weird arrogant self-importance.
But kvetching doesn’t usually solve anything. Our deep-rooted desire to overthrow the technocracy is far more parochial than merely being wound up about alleged bias and lack of transparency as to their idiotic “community standards”, which are both a joke in their content and their enforcement. We, and by this we mean more freedom-minded people who seek a decentralized web just as we seek a decentralized politics and a decentralized economy, simply don’t want a digital space owned by cretins who are not friendly or favorable to us.
Put another way, even if you wish to opine that big tech isn’t proactively anti-freedom, you cannot argue they are friends of liberty. This is especially true if your content tends toward a more staunchly, traditional, and socially conservative Judeo-Christian bent. As an example, even suggesting gender is purely biological can get you banned from Twitter. This is the tendency of the woke technocracy.
The desire to upend the marketplace and overthrow the technocracy, however, should not necessarily be about political sabre rattling. The truth many overlook is, done right, even platforms that compete for 5% of the market share could literally make their owners hundreds of millions of dollars. There is a lot of money to be made.
Our approach and focus on overthrowing the technocracy is all about the revenue. There are billions of dollars being funneled to people who got lucky, got in first, and who now want to shield themselves against any new competitors. If you really want to to find the bias of big tech, that’s it: they climbed the ladder of success and now they want to chop it down so we cannot follow.
Unless you have the means and technology to create your own platform, and if you do not like the woke technocracy, regardless of your reasons, then, to put is bluntly, you will need to become a patron of alt tech platforms, as a backer/investor, sponsor, or paid subscriber. We would add, not being willing to pay for content as a user is precisely how you keep big tech on top.
We may choose to zing the big tech overlords from time to time for their ridiculous woke authoritarian preaching and the way they talk down to everyone, but our focus is on the fact there is a massive market for digital content, digital services for self-expression and promotion, and digital tools for connecting with others.
Becoming even a tiny bit player in that space can be quite lucrative and if you do this in a way that serves freedom-minded people and builds freedom in general, advancing the freedom narrative and vision among more and more people, then so much the better.
We are motivated by a desire to broadcast a freedom vision, gather and serve freedom-builders, and advance a pro-freedom agenda in every arena, including the market, the digital space, and even politics. But we understand that the free market, not charity and certainly not kvetching, is the path to advancement for our cause. Of course you can back our efforts by becoming a subscribing here and accessing original, unique content you won’t find anywhere else.
Our voice is unique and will provide you real news and inspirational content that can actually benefit your life in the here and now.
The battle against the woke technocracy is a free market fight, waged through gaining viewers, subscribers, sponsors, and backers who want more freedom-building content and policies within the digital commons. But it’s not a head-to-head fight. We are essentially the digital guerillas huddling in the jungle, trying to avoid a far superior force in open battle.
The battle against the woke technocracy is in a guerilla stage. We therefore propose that, money being the driving force in the market, and money being far more alluring than woke ideology, the paid subscriptions model is our best bet. The paid subscription model both allows for smaller platforms to grow steady as their support base grows, while starting small, and creates enough real revenue that even biased payment processors don’t look askance at the revenue generated for them.
We would suggest that the alt tech, pro-freedom platform community, the community of actual alt tech and alt content providers, connect for mutual benefit and support in the form of freedom tech guild. This guild could leverage its collective weight and spending power so that one platform or digital content provider cannot be easily targeted by a woke payment processor. Or perhaps this group could form a consortium for payment processing, for legal defense and offense, for hosting, and even for a truly good alt tech search engine.
Getting to that place or convincing enough alt tech providers to join such a guild is way beyond our capability unless we ourselves command a large enough audience and paid subscription support base. But something like this, which allows a plethora of platforms to grow and prosper serving niche communities of people, is what will eventually become a thousand and thousands and tens of thousands of cuts that weaken the woke technocracy.
The “free speech platform” model is too complex and requires massive technical, financial, legal, and political firepower with which to rout the predicted monopolist response, which will include effort to cut off technology and all means of processing payments as well as massive demonization by the DNC Press. What makes this model so problematic isn’t just the technology, but the moderation and governance, not to mention the public relations blows that would be landed every day against the platform and its owners and builders.
In addition to all these problems, both real and artificially imposed by the woke technocracy and their allies, there is the fact the marketplace, the potential users, subscribers, and sponsors, don’t really want a free speech space they have to share with actual racists, neonazis, jihadists, chauvinists, nasty trolls, bullies, extremists, or even communists. The market may want more liberalized platforms for the general public than the woke authoritarians wish to provide, but they definitely don’t want the free speech limited only by whatever it’s “legal” to say and they may balk at the notion the government should dictate the moderation policies of platforms.
It is tempting to say the platforms are no different than the phone company, but when a phone call is over the content only exists if one or more parties record it and nobody is being asked to sponsor that content. Moreover, the users themselves are paying for access and use, which doesn’t occur with platforms today. Platforms are stuck with your content and if they want a brand-friendly product for sponsors, and if those sponsors, like most corporations, tend toward the woke authoritarianism spectrum, then content moderation must reflect sponsor wishes.
It’s a pity more and more corporations, perhaps also owing to their market dominance, only seem to care about the sensitivities and interests of a segment of the population while assuming everyone must buy from them because you can’t possibly boycott all the woke authoritarian corporations, but this is a fact of life we have to navigate and invent our way around.
As we see it, the only shortcut is for users to replace the corporate sponsors in such numbers that the total population of users on woke platforms decreases substantively enough to truly awaken the corporate backers to a new reality wherein they have lost access to a substantial plurality of potential customers.
This is not going to be accomplished by creating “one big system” (OBS) to defeat another OBS. What will have to happen is two things: users who are sick of the woke garbage will have to actually pony up and start paying for content and access and providers will need to find innovative ways to serve unique content and meet the needs of more niche communities in awesome ways.
The real problem may be that, even if providers truly do a good job, the user base will pin their hopes on government regulation to force free platforms to be nicer to them instead of the obvious path, which is to financially back friendly platforms and content providers who cannot afford to be free.
The path to overthrow the woke technocracy isn’t easy and there is no simple “fire and forget” solution. It will involve, we imagine, the following:
1. First and foremost, a willingness for users to become paid subscribers to niche platforms and content providers who are trying to compete with the woke technocracy
2. The innovation of providers who focus on niche platforms and/or truly unique content worthy of paid subscriber backing
3. The development of a guild or coalition of providers who share resources and form consortia (plural of consortium) to provide alternatives to the woke corporate payment processors, search, hosting, cdn’s, email list management, and the like
4. While not covered in this article, we also envision a common backbone based on api hooks that allows cross-posting on alt tech platforms, ways for users to create a homepage that collates content from those platforms, and ways to push content on or advertise on various alt tech platforms
For our part we offer unique content HERE for the freedom builder via paid subscriptions, we are building a niche platform for more Christian or socially conservative audience, and we promote other platforms and providers.
It only takes a spark, as they say, and we hope to join those who, together, in this guerilla stage of the battle against the woke technocracy, to be a part of that spark for a truly free and pluralistic digital commons.
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