(1) So yes, basically everyone Alt Right OR Alt Lite is now getting their channels deleted, demonetized, or at least having some of their videos deleted.

I don’t closely follow the vlogosphere, but here is a Twitter thread that seems to be pretty comprehensive.

It’s worth pointing out that demonetization is nearly as bad as an outright ban, as it demoralizes creators, and in some cases, cuts off their main source of income. Relying on Patreon or Subscribestars (a recent and less PC Russian alternative) is a bandaid – while we greatly appreciate the exceptions, anonymous readers are rarely very generous, and you need to be really big to make even a decent living off public donations. And they can always shut you down as well. Patreon is more than happy to kick controversial people off by itself, while Subscribestars had to cease operations for a period of time after PayPal cut them off.

(2) Guess the Alt Lite and BASED conservatives should have protested more when this started i.e. when Andrew Anglin (Daily Stormer) got deplatformed in the wake of Charlottesville almost two years ago. Now it’s too late.

(3) I am assuming that Trump is continuing to monitor censorship… all the way to losing in 2020 and going to prison soon afterwards.

At that point, most likely everything else will be shut down.

(4) I have a blog post ready to go about how the vlogosphere has superseded the old blogosphere over the past few years. Obviously, it will now have to be substantially rewritten.

But the main point to take from here is that YouTube is not going to become the center of anti-Establishment dissidence that we thought it might be, just as similar delusions about the power of Twitter and other social media were dispelled from around 2017*.

YouTube will become a repository for cat and unpacking videos.

(5) Yes, alternatives exist, but by and large, people are not going to bother going to Bitchute or RuTube. Three reasons why.

First, they are much smaller than YouTube, which is a de facto monopolist in this sphere, and so derives vast benefits from network effects.

Second, YouTube operates on an annual loss of a billion dollars. It is something that Alphabet subsidizes for presumably political reasons. No other site can afford to be a YouTube. Videos take up a lot of storage space, and HDD’s don’t come free!

Third, let’s be honest, many of the people driven off are not so much dissidents as assorted freaks and weirdos. Their presence will deter “normies” from migrating over. We already have a perfect example of that with Gab (Twitter alternative) and Voat (Reddit alternative).

(6) There are increasing signs that Alt Leftists are going to be progressively shut down as well – some of those deplatformed today were outright anti-Alt Right.

Moreover, apart from institutionalizing blank slatism, YouTube is also committing to fighting “falsehoods” such as 9/11 or Sandy Hook conspiracy theories. While I do not buy into those two in particular, imagine if YouTube had existed in the 1960s, and it censored “conspiracy theories” portraying the Gulf of Tonkin incident as the “false flag” it turned out to be. And we don’t even have to look decades back. The Saudis are clearly going out of the way building a case for war with Iran, with those ridiculous “Iranian attacks” on their oil tankers. Fortunately, false flagging is an O-Ring task, and Saudis are apparently too low IQ to accomplish that. And half of the US political elites don’t have it out for Iran anyway, so there is institutional resistance.

But what if there were similar attempts to false flag a war with Russia? Or with China, whose demonization has also become increasingly bipartisan? The inability to debunk false flags – or rather, to have it catch fire – may well result in avoidable wars.

(7) Prediction: The last dissident resources in the West to remain standing will be technically adept websites financed by moneyed individuals or groups, or true cyberpunk “samizdat” outfits lurking in the deep web and kept afloat with crypto donations.

Silver lining: Filtering out the more r-selected content?

(8) The one happy thing about all this is that more and more restrictions and censorship means higher quality output.

First, it weeds out the grifters – no point to grifting when you are blacklisted and deplatformed from everything.

Second, it may also impose a certain discipline on content producers, forcing them to pick their words with care while making the same points they used to. Note that most of the greatest “subversive” literature was produced in moderately repressive ancien regimes, not democratic republics with strong freedoms of speech. When everything has been banned, the novels of Houellebecq, for instance, may have that much more weight and resonance.

Assuming they don’t go full Stalinist and turn everything into a wasteland, anyway.

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