Corporate Unpersoning
unz.com
Corporate Unpersoning
1–10 of 49 posts
Re: Corporate Unpersoning
#2I'm starting to wonder if America needs to add basic but explicit free speech protections in a private context the way that it has anti-discrimination ones.
In the digital age, "in public" is often part of a digital forum run by a private entity (twitter, facebook, HN, fark, etc.).
Re: Corporate Unpersoning
#3For those who cringed at the title:
I am using the Orwellian verb “unperson” playfully, but I’m also trying to be precise. What’s happening isn’t censorship, technically, at least not in the majority of cases. While there are examples of classic censorship (e.g., in the UK, France, and Germany), apart from so-called “terrorist content,” most governments aren’t formally banning expressions of anti-corporatist dissent. This isn’t Czechoslovakia, after all. This is global capitalism, where the repression of dissent is a little more subtle. The point of Google unpersoning CounterPunch (and probably many other publications) and Pulitzer Prize-winning journalists like Hedges is not to prevent them from publishing their work or otherwise render them invisible to readers. The goal is to delegitmize them, and thus decrease traffic to their websites and articles, and ultimately drive them out of business, if possible.
Re: Corporate Unpersoning
#4I'm starting to wonder if America needs to add basic but explicit free speech protections in a private context the way that it has anti-discrimination ones. In the digital age, "in public" is often part of a digital forum run by a private entity (twitter, facebook, HN, fark, etc.).
Perhaps? Or just stop using Google. Stop using Gmail, stop using Google Search, stop using Google Docs. It's not that hard.
Re: Corporate Unpersoning
#5I'm starting to wonder if America needs to add basic but explicit free speech protections in a private context the way that it has anti-discrimination ones. In the digital age, "in public" is often part of a digital forum run by a private entity (twitter, facebook, HN, fark, etc.).
Perhaps? Or just stop using Google. Stop using Gmail, stop using Google Search, stop using Google Docs. It's not that hard.
> It's not that hard.
For one person maybe, but try getting all of society to do the same.
Edit: You do realise we are both using a "digital forum run by a private entity" right now?
Re: Corporate Unpersoning
#6I'm starting to wonder if America needs to add basic but explicit free speech protections in a private context the way that it has anti-discrimination ones. In the digital age, "in public" is often part of a digital forum run by a private entity (twitter, facebook, HN, fark, etc.).
I don’t think we want to be in the business of forcing companies and people to publish or promote speech that they disagree with for whatever reason.
Re: Corporate Unpersoning
#7Jesus. So many people have gone insane over this Russia thing.
Re: Corporate Unpersoning
#8I'm starting to wonder if America needs to add basic but explicit free speech protections in a private context the way that it has anti-discrimination ones. In the digital age, "in public" is often part of a digital forum run by a private entity (twitter, facebook, HN, fark, etc.).
There are plenty of options in the modern era to promulgate your views without the support of any company. You can host them on ipfs, print them out and paste them as flyers, etc.
Companies do not owe it to you to let you promote your views using their infrastructure. Maybe it is in their best interest, or the best interest of their users, or maybe not. But historically, we have valued companies' (and, transitively, company owners') free speech rights too much to force them to promote views as common carriers. There are of course a few exceptions to this where there is a compelling public interest, but you're going to have an uphill battle to prove that in the case of posting certain types of news to Facebook or Google News.
Re: Corporate Unpersoning
#9Earlier quoted context omitted.
Perhaps? Or just stop using Google. Stop using Gmail, stop using Google Search, stop using Google Docs. It's not that hard.
> It's not that hard. For one person maybe, but try getting all of society to do the same. Edit: You do realise we are both using a "digital forum run by a private entity" right now?
Yes, and if it turned out that hacker news was doing anything unscrupulous I would have no problem dropping it. I don't care what the rest of society does, start with you and yourself.
Re: Corporate Unpersoning
#10I'm starting to wonder if America needs to add basic but explicit free speech protections in a private context the way that it has anti-discrimination ones. In the digital age, "in public" is often part of a digital forum run by a private entity (twitter, facebook, HN, fark, etc.).
Perhaps? Or just stop using Google. Stop using Gmail, stop using Google Search, stop using Google Docs. It's not that hard.
DuckDuckGo, Protonmail and ...too many to list. I use Google very rarely, and mostly if I am looking how things appear the the rest of the world. DuckDuckGo is a drop in replacement for search