A thought about monstrous rich men online
The events of the last week have had me thinking about how the monstrously rich - and the monstrously criminal violators among them - eat at different restaurants than we do, and vacation in different places than we do... but despite all that, they're stuck on the same internet as we are. They engage in the same digital culture that we do.
There's been a lot of writing recently about how the internet broke rich people's brains. Seeing normal people's opinions about them radicalized them into punitive, psychotic weirdoes determined to end free discourse online.
That happened because there's only one internet, one big cauldron of digital culture. Maybe we're all sticking our ladles into it in different spots, but it's pretty much the same soup for everyone. Rich people can escape us physically, but when they log on, they're in the soup with the rest of us. Their internet is our internet. There are no broadly-recognizable memes that only rich people use, and no social media websites only for billionaires. (The thrill of social media seems to now be, after all, how many people you can access through it.) There isn't another, private digital culture for rich people only. The only digital culture available for them to manipulate is the digital culture we (perhaps sometimes wrongly) think of as our own.
There are plenty of things I personally would complain about if I had the ear of Reddit's admins. I should assume that any sick misogynist molester freak with 100 million dollars has complaint tickets they'd write, too. The only difference between us is that they can actually get that ear. So I don't believe that there will never be a platform truly immune to rich-person influence campaigns. The moment a centrally-run platform becomes popular, its leadership suddenly becomes the exact kind of rich person who is capable of running such a campaign.
We should still resist it, of course. But I don't believe that it's at all possible under our current financial system to prevent people who run large platforms from gaining the same incentive structures, social access, and motivations that people like Epstein, Bobby Kotick, Elon Musk, etc. all have. Which means that they stand a good chance of meeting those people, becoming their friends, and eventually being bound to them by social obligation and mutual interest. Fundamentally, I do not believe that you should expect large platforms to ever be even remotely capable of institutionally resisting the advice, requests, or social taint of their leaders' rich peers.
I know it's not possible or practical for everyone to run their own website. I am not even running my own blog - I am using Bear. But getting out from under the umbrella of this bullshit is valuable, and the time and effort it requires is time well spent.
One of the reasons I chose Bear specifically is that it is small. There are plenty of small or "unsuccessful" services you could be using instead of big, "successful" ones. If you'd like to put yourself as far away as possible from the dynamics I've described above, perhaps the fact that a service is small or unsuccessful should be a pro to you rather than a con!