My second post ever on this blog was titled with the internet-age utopian phrase Information Wants To Be Free. Even at that time one of my blog-inspirations (which I cited there) had been shuttered, I think after the professor behind it was found and “cancelled” (before that was a common term, and before the same thing happened to the next anonymous blog he started). Another variant of that phrase was fond of was “information wants to be indestructible“, which might be true in the sense that once loose it’s hard to hunt down every copy, but isn’t quite so true in terms of easy availability.

The most citeable blog to end last year was Scott Alexander’s, and I’ve been rethinking his post Freedom on the Centralized Web. I’m less optimistic now than I used to be now that not only social media companies, but also smartphone companies and AWS hosting have banded together against a politically disfavored app (even though by magnitude the total amount of “harm” done by Facebook by those standards is far greater), well after Cloudflare dropped an even more politically disfavored site in a way even their own CEO was uncomfortable with (which, given how easily DDOS attacks can be mobilized, is equivalent to being kicked off the internet). Karl Kasarda (who had a similarly pessimistic take on the state of computer security in light of SolarWinds) gives the run down on this incident and all the ways in which a similar upstart could be restricted in his mockingly titled The Free Market Solution. He advocates there an internet version of the Bill of Rights for platforms, something I’m still not entirely comfortable with (perhaps we could have a low-rent public option, analogous to the Post Office, required not to engage in content-based discrimination).

You might note there that I linked to Kasarda’s videos on BitChute, rather than Youtube where I first watched them. That was deliberate. I was long a pro-Google anti-Apple partisan because the former didn’t try to lock down their phones as much and I found their numerous free products useful rather than overpriced conspicuous consumption. But I’ve been unable to root my most recent phone from them (meaning I couldn’t download an app they banned from their app store if I actually wanted to), and I’ve lost enough confidence in their original product that I’m now using DuckDuckGo for search instead (unless I’m disappointed in the paltry results, so I do still sometimes use it as a backup). I know some of you might think I’m still under the thumb of software megacorps because the email on my about page here is hosted by Microsoft, but they haven’t been acting like the Evil Empire nearly as much recently. It’s nice to imagine being as idealist as Richard Stallman and refusing to use anything closed-source, but I got my most recent phone because my job required a specific app (I normally try to install as few as possible, using it more like a feature phone except with email alerts), and even Stallman was cancelled recently (while Linus Torvalds had an apology extracted but continued in his same position).

I’ve resisted linking to twitter (where I unfortunately have been having more conversations than on blogs recently) up until now, but Alexey Navalny’s thread (all threads should be posts!) complaining about twitter’s ban though a dissident political lens is worth linking to. I am still refusing to automatically publish my posts here as tweets because I dislike social media and would prefer for people to use RSS. I suppose I nevertheless ought to make an exception by cross-posting this one.

On the topic of tolerating even disfavored speech, I’ve long linked to Scott Alexander’s The Spirit of the First Amendment (along with Be Nice, At Least Until You Can Coordinate Meanness). To that I should now add Vitalik Buterin’s Credible Neutrality As A Guiding Principle, which generalizes beyond the obviously “political” to the idea of good mechanism design, as does his post linked from there on “central planning” in design.