A Heretic's Guide to Deplatforming

Yes, the first wave defines the project; if the first wave has problems, the project is infused with these problems. This is true of free software projects also. I have a couple of examples:

• The KDE project (to create a nice graphical desktop environment based on the X windowing system) was initially formed around using the Qt library for graphical user interface widgets. The Qt library had, at the time, a somewhat friendly but distinctly non-free license. The first wave of developers on KDE, therefore, were developers who considered proprietary software and/or sketchy licensed to be A-OK.¹ This will probably forever define the development practices of the KDE project.

• The Go language is, by many accounts, a very nice programming language. But it was started, and still run, by Google people, for Google purposes, and with Google backing. This means that the first wave of developers were and are those developers who think it’s perfectly fine to work at Google, or to work with Google to further Google’s goals. People who don’t like Google will of course have stayed away from the Go project at the outset, and so the developer elite of the Go project will probably always reflect Google values and priorities.

1. Those developers who did not agree went on to start Gnome, which is in fact the very reason Gnome was started.

Nobody is claiming that tolerance is equal to intolerance, that would be silly; the claim is that intolerance [of an instance] may be required for tolerance [in society at large], to prosper. What is being tolerated and what is not being tolerated are difference, hence the "contradiction" isn't a contradiction at all. Nothing is melded. The core idea of indiscriminate tolerance (the issues with which I mentioned you haven't seemed to address) is not altered by this new principle; it's entirely possible to be tolerant of everything.

What do you say to the claim that laws (restrictions on absolute freedom) may be required to guarantee freedom? Does this claim demolish the foundation of freedom by melding it with its direct opposite? From this example, your abstract point is pretty poor; this issue with freedom has been picked up since the time of the earliest philosophers, and they really do seem paradoxical.

That's not to say your concrete (specific) point on intolerance is wrong, but your abstract point about melding an idea with its opposite is poorly founded, and doesn't hold up to a dialectical analysis in place of considering the ideas as binary opposites.

> Gab would like to use Stripe or Paypal because they are trusted payment providers, but those networks felt they'd stop being trusted payment providers if they let Gab stay on.

That's an extreme simplification that borders on deceptive. No one is going to stop using Paypal and Stripe because they support a platform. Maybe if they were processing payments for ISIS, but Alex Jones isn't ISIS.

No, Paypal and Stripe were given orders from above and this is them carrying out those orders.

> I'm glad our internet is enough of a distributed commons that many platforms are broadly accessible -- but nobody owes you an audience at the most popular ones.

This would only make sense if there wasn't an active campaign to shut out smaller platforms in order to control the ecosystem. What is the point of making a sound if no one is around to hear it?

Saying people should just change platforms is like saying people should just change internet companies. Sure, HughesNet might be an alternative to the only worthwhile provider in my area, but you can't say with a straight face that the experience is comparable. You're dismissing the problems other people face in getting their voices heard because it doesn't directly affect you. It's easy to take the high road with the deplatforming debate but only if you ignore the bigger picture.

You are mistaking "good faith" for satisfying others' entitlement

The spirit of your complaint here is "there should be a reasonably easy path for me to widely distribute my message without getting the rug pulled out from under me". There is exactly one way to distribute your message, and whether it is easy or hard is up to you. That is: satisfy the requirements of every platform you build on top of, and fill in the rest by creating your own infrastructure and audience.

I believe in common spaces, and like I said I am glad that if you drill down far enough you will find distributed* protocols that aren't opinionated about your content. Feel free to start there and build an ecosystem and audience - that is how the world discovers who wants to participate in a particular kind of dialogue.

The * is that of course central censorship exists at the Telecom and government levels. I (directly) support distributed private protocols to ensure that people can choose to find the information they want as easily as possible. But doing so emphatically doesn't and shouldn't guarantee you an audience.

> Nobody in this conversation is interested in building gulags or putting the undesirables in them.

For now. That will be step 2