I just saw a comment on a Facebook post about Amazon deciding not to continue hosting Parler on Amazon servers, i.e., shut Parler down. [For those who don’t know, Parler is the place many people being banned or hassled by Facebook and Twitter fled to exercise their right to speak freely.]
The comment said, “Business move, not political.”
My response to this question is: What difference does it make why Amazon and other businesses facilitate/implement the government’s desire to infringe on American’s freedom of speech? When the powers-that-be (the government, Big Tech, MSM, the Intelligencia, and others) honor people’s petitions to silence other people because the petitioners do not like what those “other people” say, more and more petitions will be made, and more and more speech will be banned. As if the tyranny of that is not bad enough, keeping up with the continually changing rules as to what is mandatory and what is forbidden can become impossible. At that point, officials can say with certainty, “Show me the man, and I will show you the crime.” Lavrentiy Beria, head of Joseph Stalin’s secret police.
That process can quickly devolve to the stage where loyalty oaths are mandatory (“silence is violence”), and those who do not deliver the pledge with vigor and apparent conviction are doomed. Examples of this kind of tyranny are many, but I doubt anyone has described the end of this process better than Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. See the webpage linked below.
Of course, this outcome is not inevitable, but I can’t figure out what can stop the process. If unstopped, neither lambs nor wolves who do not comply will have a chance.
Google, Amazon and Microsoft provide Cloud Service, AWS and Azure (resp) as “cloud” services that countless companies and government agencies have chosen as the most convenient and “least-expensive” way to provide functionality and to “secure” their databases and websites. These transitions have been torrential lately, where agencies and companies are falling over themselves to convert their infrastructures to be nestled in the clutches of these mammoth providers. For example, both the Agency I code for and the company that pays me to code for that agency BOTH have moved to one or more of these platforms. This means that our government is handing its computing infrastructure over to these companies for “safe” keeping, while my employer has every facet of its infrastructure (storage, communication, and payroll – albeit the latter is with forth company) owned by these providers, all because of, in essence, convenience.
This convenience has been the clarion call for our countries governance, commerce, and populace, where we are made more dumb and dependent with each clicking of “I agree to these terms and conditions”. It also makes our civilization more vulnerable to attack. Just as planting a single variety of corn or wheat across the country makes the entire crop vulnerable to a single disease, these companies using a single technique for encrypting their data makes everyone they protect ripe for a planet-wide breach. The Poodle attack (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poodle_attack) is a perfect example of this, where for years, HTTPS (the means by which all websites provided encryption) was compromised so that nothing was actually encrypted one servers that were infected by that vulnerability,
When thinking like a libertarian, I tell myself that it’s our fault that these companies have taken control of our lives, and will take more control of more of what we do, say, and think. It’s our fault. We deserve it. Most of the older folks are fully aware of what totalitarianism is and of its methods. We can see it an archipelago away. We should not have let it happen, but the peepshow was just too damn titillating… just too free… just too easy.
I’m thinking that we learn from our adversarial overlords and create a movement, perhaps call it AntiTo, and create our own server farms to house the Parlers of the world (and the Parlors too I guess,what the heck, we’re going to need to get paid somehow) and establish our own network, maybe call it TruFree or LiberLunch, or better, Lilu (which means of course there will be a fee, sometimes double-speak needs to be made obvious). We’ll need to have our own banks with which to transact (we can’t let Chase et.al. keep people from paying us, or us from being able to buy food or travel) and our own satellite system (we can’t let Bill and Elon throttle our ability to get the word out), and our own Unix-based open-source cell phones so that they can’t throttle our communications and log our movements and purchases.
Looking back over that last paragraph, I’m thinking we may be getting a bit of a late start. I’m thinking it may be way too inconvenient. I’m thinking we may be screwed.