Big Tech is Big Brother

Big Tech Comes of Age
What will be the New Right’s response?

I understand this moment as Big Tech’s political coming of age. Since the days when Milo Yiannopoulos and Alex Jones were banned from Twitter and Youtube, respectively, conservatives en masse have gotten not just concerned but seriously antsy about what social media means for the First Amendment. Some with greater foresight than I have been worried for much longer than that. But everyone with eyes to see knew we had reached a watershed when the New York Post was suspended from Twitter in the lead-up to last year’s election for the crime of *checks notes* breaking a story that threatened the Democratic candidate’s chances.

What we are up against here is a threat to our freedom of speech which, like digital technology itself, is not quite like anything we’ve seen before. On the one hand, digital media has furnished us with wholly new ways of relating to one another and engaging with the world. On the other, a small cadre of despotic tycoons has now achieved a wholly new kind of stranglehold on public discourse. It is a novel form of attack upon the American way of life, and it will require a novel form of response. 

The monopoly that people like Jack Dorsey, Mark Zuckerberg, and Jeff Bezos now possess is not actually a financial monopoly. As such, the concern about it is not fundamentally an anti-trust concern, though anti-trust law may be relevant to breaking some of their control. In essence, what Big Tech has achieved is a monopoly on American attention and communications channels. As such it is a threat not merely to “muh free market” but, much more urgently, to the First Amendment of the United States Constitution, which is at risk of being rendered moot by the fact that a few men have unprecedented power to decide what we know, and when.

Full article: americanmind.substack.com/p/big-tech-comes-of-age