I wasn’t much interested in contributing to “save Gawker.com” since the people involved seemed to have an entirely adequate grip on the situation:
If we don’t raise enough money to buy the site, we will preserve the archive and launch a new publication under a different name. We’re bringing this back whether we have the Gawker URL or not.
What happened?
Weren’t they moving away from that?
Also, I think you mean archive.org .
Good to hear that they’re finally changing that. I wonder if any “park-nuked” sites will come back?
As I recall, they also look for directions in the HTML of the page, so there might branches of Thiel’s evil-scheme-tree still unpruned. If all else fails, he can throw more $10M bundles into legal threats against archive.org until they cave in, because he’s just that kind of dick.
Should we start a thread?
Not quite. Capital-L Libertarianism (of the type currently practised in the U.S. and promoted by Thiel) does tend to lead to a new form of feudalism, as the unregulated “greed is good” drive for more-more-more concentrates wealth in the hands of a smaller number of corporate and human barons.
WOW… Respect.
Even in feudalism, lords had some obligations to their subjects.
He wants no restrictions on himself, while also wanting a massive surveillance state to protect him from people inclined to kill him, eat him and take his stuff.
Now let’s see if any of the bloviators prior to this post have the guts to come back.
Rebranded liberalism.
Feudal in effect, though. Which is unsurprising; supplanting the existing aristocracy was the original point of it all.
When any privately owned internet company chooses to kick someone out and remove content, and that someone is Not Popular On BoingBoing, there are many here who are quick to point out that since these are private firms that may grant access as they please, this is not, repeat not, censorship.
Looks like there is an unsauced gander or two hanging about. Thiel may be a feudalist, but one thing he is not is a censor.
Why don’t you try to reply to some of the points made by @MatthewPhelan instead of “abloo bloo bloo liberal group think”?
Here’s a rhetorical question for you to cogitate on, since you seem to care so deeply about logic and semantic accuracy: What constitutes true censorship, by your personal definition, in the golden age of public-private partnerships?
When the CIA’s venture capital group In-Q-Tel seeds something like Peter Thiel’s big data surveillance outfit Palantir Technologies, which then itself becomes a government contractor to monitor very broadly defined terrorist groups and social movements online, at what point does Thiel stop becoming a vaunted private citizen exercising his most holy human liberties as enshrined within the U.S. Constitution, but instead becomes merely a tertiary agent of state power?
Whether Thiel is a nobleman or a scoundrel (he appears to have won a libel suit on questionable grounds) is irrelevant to whether what he might do with the Gawker archive constitutes censorship. It does not.
That’s a fair point for discussion. As BoingBoing and Glen Greenwald are pretty much the only leftist sources for criticism about anti-privacy actions during the Obama administration, no one here can be charged with hypocrisy.
I don’t like Thiel or anyone else weaponizing data collection on behalf of the fedgov, and Cory was absolutely correct in putting air quotes around “libertarian”.
But if it’s not censorship for Google or Twitter or any given hosting company to ban sites/users based on their political views, it is not censorship for Thiel to buy the Gawker archive and do whatever he pleases with it.
In the interest of clarity, (and I can only speak for a few of us on the left anecdotally, but) when we do any of this “LOL. Twitter is not censoring you, [alt-right figure x]!” it’s part of a rhetorical gambit that I’m not hearing that you recognize. The goal is to point to a thread that, if pulled, leads to the conclusion that privately owned “town squares” and “public forums” and “communities” have inherent anti-democratic dangers (be they shopping malls, social media networks, or even this very bbs, in a way). Especially, in our current context when they are choking out true, democratically managed, public spaces. I have to bow out of this conversation today, but I hope this adds some nuance to the cheapo technicality that you’re trying to work into a “these leftists are hypocrites” argument.
There’s lots of conservative group think too. I’ve been banned from a couple of places as being a homo-loving, Trump-hating, dope-legalizing librul.
It’s been amazing to see the amount of “four legs good, two legs bad” on both sides during the past year.
No, it’s pretty goddamn clear that exactly one side in this country has the monopoly on complete and utter horseshit passed off as truth. Everybody already knows this, of course, save the few cowards who won’t make a single post in the Trump Thread here on BB, but seem to infest every other thread with half-assed excuses and “perhaps the truth is in the middle” or “both sides are bad” rhetoric.
I don’t have much of a problem if anyone says “My tribe is absolutely one hundred point zero percent right on every single aspect of every single issue, and the other tribe is absolutely one hundred point zero percent wrong.” I may think it’s a bit silly, but no objection in principle.
What does roil my bowels is ends-justifying-the-means hypocrisy…Changing the filibuster rule/threatening a government shutdown/substituting executive orders for legislation/kicking people off an online medium is Great and to be Celebrated when it scores a win for our side, but Evil and Criminal when “they” score on our team…That’s bullshit.
Thiel does want to censor the political speech of the majority of the country - women.
