Author: Allen Farrington

Big Tech and Regulation—A Response to the Quillette Editors

Published by Allen Farrington

Donald Trump has been permanently suspended from Twitter. And Facebook, Reddit, Twitch, Shopify, Snap, Stripe, Discord, and—most crushingly of all—Pinterest. This was swiftly followed by a swathe of account purges across various platforms, ostensibly on the grounds that terms of service had been violated. Bizarrely, conservatives reacted to this development by lamenting the lack of arbitrary government intervention in private enterprise, while their liberal opponents celebrated corporate squashing of individual expression. If you don’t like it, build your own app. Arguably more important, if less sensational, has been the coordinated nuking of the efforts of those Trump fans who did, in fact, build their own app. Google and Apple banned conservative social media aspirant Parler from their app stores, effectively throttling its only viable distribution channels. Amazon then went a step further and revoked Parler’s right to host its site on its web service, AWS. For good measure, authentication service Okta and internet-to-telecoms interface platform Twilio withdrew their infrastructure too. If you don’t like it, build your own internet. The fallout has been intense and …

After Academia

Published by Allen Farrington

I keep being invited to talk about free speech on college campuses and every time I’m invited I make the same point: that this isn’t about free speech and this is only tangentially about college campuses. This is about a breakdown in the basic logic of civilisation, and it’s spreading. College campuses may be the first dramatic battle but of course this is going to find its way into the courts; it’s already found its way into the tech sector. It’s going to find its way to the highest level of governance if we aren’t careful, and it actually does jeopardise the ability of civilisation to continue to function. ~Bret Weinstein Mike Nayna’s documentary on the Evergreen State College Affair, from which I transcribed the above quote from Bret Weinstein, is a riveting watch. No matter how closely you followed the debacle at the time, there is really no substitute for this fascinating glimpse behind the scenes. Evergreen academics can be seen meekly and repeatedly submitting to ideological manipulation, and on a number of occasions …

The White Privilege of Being Black

Published by Allen Farrington

On Tuesday, January 15, radio host David Webb interviewed civil rights attorney and CNN analyst Areva Martin on his Sirius XM show. Towards the end of their exchange, Martin accused Webb of having white privilege. Confused, Webb asked Martin to explain how he had come to have this privilege. “By virtue of being a white male,” Martin informed him irritably, “you have white privilege.” To which Webb replied, “I hate to break it to you, but I’m black.” . @SIRIUSXM Patriot Host @davidwebbshow mistakenly accused for his "White Privilege" by @CNN Analyst @ArevaMartin. pic.twitter.com/WPh6bXPbgy — SiriusXM Patriot (@SiriusXMPatriot) January 15, 2019 Much of the reaction to this incident has come from conservative outlets gleefully mocking the double jackpot of a prominent liberal embarrassing herself while attempting to espouse a political ideology they find absurd. I agree that it was funny, and I’m actually disappointed Webb didn’t allow Martin to dig herself an even deeper hole before revealing his hand. But the interview also reveals an obnoxious moral outlook that seems to be alarmingly widely held; not …

PewDiePie’s Battle for the Soul of the Internet

Published by Allen Farrington

This is a story about the question of who holds power over what we can say, hear, watch and read on the internet—an increasingly urgent issue that many ordinary people have cause to think about every day. And yet the protagonist in this story, the man whose fate symbolizes the future of social media and the corporate web that controls it, is unknown to the vast majority of educated readers. That man is PewDiePie, a Swedish comedian whose real name is Felix Kjellberg. With 77-million subscribers, he has the most popular YouTube channel in the world. Within YouTube’s video subculture, he is regarded as a true celebrity—a sort of Joe Rogan, Kanye West and Ben Shapiro all rolled into one. As of this writing, PewDiePie is closing in on 20-billion total views—roughly equivalent to three views for every human on the planet. Yet describing the actual content that Kjellberg delivers to his viewers can be challenging. When he dropped out of school and began seriously promoting his channel in 2010, his feed was largely devoted …