| Clever Enough to Avoid Censors? When these takedowns began a few years ago, the tech giants hit obvious cases of crazy extremists that no one would really defend. I had a discussion with video pundit Dave Rubin. He told me that the banning of Milo Yiannopoulos and Alex Jones was a warning sign. People would not defend them due to their views, so their silencing becomes a precedent. It was designed to warm up the crowds for a broader use of the silencing technique. That was perhaps two years ago. I wondered if he was right. People also believe they will be clever enough to outsmart the censor – probably I believed that – but they presume that people know precisely what runs afoul of them, or that the rules are stable and evenly enforced. This is far from the case. Anyone can get censored; once it happens, it is too late to protest. In the meantime, I've seen countless bans of people who do not qualify as extremists. They simply have opinions that fall outside the mainstream. An example from two weeks ago is my friend and bestselling author Naomi Wolf. She has been a ferocious opponent of vaccine passports. After two incidents of throttling her account, she was removed completely. Now, here's where it gets interesting. There are always going to be Twitter mobs out there who will celebrate when someone is banned. Maybe they figure that if they scream enough support for the ban, the same will not happen to them. Or maybe they are just against any discussion of ideas with which they disagree. In these cases, they make all kinds of allegations: Naomi said this goofy thing, that hateful thing, that crazy thing. How can we verify precisely what it was that she said that got her taken from the platform? There are various options. Unless someone takes a screen shot just before the account is pulled, there is no record of precisely why it was pulled. It just goes away. It doesn't matter if the person has worked years to amass a huge following – and this is personal capital that we trusted these companies to keep in custody for us – it can be deleted instantly without consequence. Will this weird device be in your home soon? It's Not About Reach In my earlier piece, I wrote about how big tech signed up as front-line workers in the lockdown wars. In 2020, anything that contradicted the latest line from the CDC — and sometimes even if it did not — was vulnerable to a complete banishment from all big channels. This is why people are ever more turning to services like Rumble and Odysee. These companies, and there are many other competitors, are the future simply because they allow people to reach people with sincere thought – same as YouTube once did. My earlier missive on this topic said the following, which I thought to be true at the time: "If you only have a few followers, if you say nothing particularly interesting, you are going to be fine. Once you gain influence, and once you say things you are not supposed to say, look out." Let me revise that opinion. You are not "going to be fine." Here is the critical point of the video deleted above. It was a live showing of a book club in New Jersey, a small reading group meeting in a bar to discuss my book Liberty or Lockdown. That's all they were doing. They were students, various people concerned about policy trends. I gave a 10-minute talk, and then took some questions. I wasn't there for the entire event but what I heard was highly intelligent. No one was trashing vaccines. No one was pushing alternative therapeutics or giving any kind of medical advice. By the way, it's fine with me if they had but it's my understanding that YouTube frowns on that. That's not what this was about. It was just nice people talking about a book about policy responses, and that's all. If my previous theory of censorship was correct (and maybe it was why I wrote it), the video should have stayed up. Instead it was zapped, not because it was getting tens of thousands of views. Want to take a guess as to how many people had watched this before it was removed? The answer: 35. That's right, only 35 people saw it and YouTube flipped out and deleted it. So my previously generous idea that you have the right to speak, but not to have influence, seems not quite true anymore. I would never say that 35 people constitutes influence but perhaps YouTube has figured out the power of ideas. It doesn't take a tremendous amount of views to make a difference, since ideas once planted can spread in other ways. Today's Prophecy The reason why these tech giants got this way is that in the early days, they embraced the whole theme of internet economics: information wants to be free. It's no longer free like beer, and I understand that: there needs to be some business model to keep the lights on. What's troubling is that it is no longer free like speech. Let me revise that. There are whole sectors of the internet that do embrace free speech, it's just that it is the new generation of sites and technologies about which the mainstream media is not speaking. You only find out about these sites through rough experience of discovering that the companies you once trusted have turned against you. You look for alternatives and finally discover them. I think Gilder is right that the stars of the tech world from 10 years ago are fading. These companies are turning their backs on the very business model that made them big to begin with. It was YouTube's great insight that everyone with a small talent or idea would like to reach a bigger audience. Everyone can, in effect, be on TV. Of course every venue needs some curation but to delete a video with 35 views of a book club in New Jersey is next level. It eats away at the very foundation of what made these companies prosper, while creating new opportunities for the next generation of clever entrepreneurs and investors. Regards, 
Jeffrey Tucker | 
Dear Daily Prophecy Reader,
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