Stop Hate For Profit

Free speech is more relevant now than it has ever been before simply because now there's more speech than ever before. The internet and all the social platforms on it have created an environment in which all of us can share our thoughts, opinions, likes and dislikes with millions of people at any time we wish to do so. It's sad then to have to conclude that this open space for discussion has not brought us closer together, but the exact opposite.

We live in an age of late stage capitalism, an age in which almost nothing escapes capitalism's tendency to want to commodify absolutely everything. What used to be common and accessible by everyone in the developed world, like clean drinking water, is now private property and used to maximize profits for the individuals who own it. That's ultimately the reason why in many places clean drinkable water isn't delivered though the faucet anymore; privatization of water pipeline networks has been a predictable disaster, so now we're forced to buy bottled water. What's next? Clean breathable air in a can? The profit motive has reduced honest news to salable news, prompting "news" networks to not deliver the news as is, but to mold it into something their customer-base will buy; we live in the age of fake news because of this, because it's the age of sensationalized news.

Facebook is the next step in the commodification of everything. It offers it's services for free to you and me because in this business-model it is you and me who are the salable products, it is us who have been commoditized by Mark Zuckerberg's little goldmine. Advertisers pay big bucks to be able to use the data gathered by Facebook's algorithms, because they can very narrowly target their advertisements to users who fit the profile of their perfect customer. And because this whole virtual online economy is powered by our clicks, we've drifted further and further apart from each other, retreated further and further back into our own bubbles of like-minded people who share our interests and opinions. As if cognitive bias and confirmation bias in themselves aren't difficult enough to overcome, platforms like Google, YouTube, Twitter, Facebook and the likes have amplified those natural tendencies with an algorithmic turbo-injection.

As a result, we live our online lives in the age of flame-wars, all because the flame-war is the perfect business-model for the tech-giants so many of us still thank on our bare knees for how they've enriched our lives... And now that we've reached a stage wherein the most extreme opinions oppose each other online, and are most visible because they're also the loudest, mostly as a result of the commodification of our free speech and the profits attached to the clicks that are most likely to land on the most extreme and provocative headlines, only now the money powers try to censor those voices. This is of course meaningless and only further impedes free speech. Now we have this campaign with a title that I like so much that I've made it the title for this post: Stop Hate for Profit. But I don't like what they're doing at all; they try to persuade big advertisers to boycott Facebook, and they demand that Facebook addresses (censors) the most extreme voices. And they're being successful as well according to this article: Over 400 Advertisers Hit Pause On Facebook, Threatening $70 Billion Juggernaut:

Now, more than 400 companies, from Coca-Cola and Adidas to Ford and Lego, have vowed to halt advertising on the social network, in a growing protest over how it handles hate speech and other harmful content.

This is bullshit of course and doesn't address the problem at all. And I don't want Facebook or Coca-Cola to be the arbiters of what's allowed and what's not allowed as it's in their very capitalist nature to use that power in order to benefit themselves and only themselves; every anti-establishment voice, every opinion aimed against the status quo will be silenced. We need to attack this craziness at its root and maybe admit that it's ludicrous to want to commodify everything, to want to make a profit on everything. Just admit that it's bonkers to make a profit on something as essential for life as water, and on something as essential for a functioning democratic society as speech.

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