<story><title>I resigned from Twitter</title><url>https://twitter.com/jack/status/1465347002426867720</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Dumblydorr</author><text>Has mediating access to information been the defining tool of control for civilizations? Maybe in tyrannical, despotic societies that is true, but those don&amp;#x27;t allow Twitter today via firewalls, so that&amp;#x27;s mostly a moot point in this thread.&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;d say the sword and the coin have both been far more controlling than limited information spread.&lt;p&gt;What of free society? Is the government of the USA, UK, or other &amp;quot;enlightened&amp;quot; societies throughout history relying upon censorship and denial of information? I think they&amp;#x27;re moreso allowing moneyed interests and plutocracy to have lobbying and backdoor dealings, they can easily ignore the public square most of the time. I just don&amp;#x27;t see Twitter piercing the armor of entrenched interests that well.&lt;p&gt;In contrast, I do see it degrading and toxifying democratic discourse, making us less resilient and more divided. That&amp;#x27;s anti-thetical to a free society in my view.</text></item><item><author>mjamil</author><text>I&amp;#x27;m in a post-Thanksgiving charitable mood, so thank you, Jack. The execution hasn&amp;#x27;t been perfect (as has been commented on ad nauseam), but Twitter is the closest to a worldwide-accessible [1] Speaker&amp;#x27;s Corner [2] I know of, and that - despite all the completely valid criticism - is a valuable public service: mediating access to information has been the defining tool of control for those in power pretty much since civilization began, and I, for one, will always pick an imperfectly moderated cesspool over the prior status quo where a church or a government told me what&amp;#x27;s true and what to think. FWIW, you&amp;#x27;ve also championed transparency and decentralization for your platform more than any other SV social media titan [3].&lt;p&gt;[1] If you have access to the Internet, that is.
[2] &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&amp;#x2F;wiki&amp;#x2F;Speakers%27_Corner&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&amp;#x2F;wiki&amp;#x2F;Speakers%27_Corner&lt;/a&gt; 
[3] &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;twitter.com&amp;#x2F;jack&amp;#x2F;status&amp;#x2F;1204766078468911106&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;twitter.com&amp;#x2F;jack&amp;#x2F;status&amp;#x2F;1204766078468911106&lt;/a&gt;</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>salt-thrower</author><text>&amp;gt; What of free society? Is the government of the USA, UK, or other &amp;quot;enlightened&amp;quot; societies throughout history relying upon censorship and denial of information? I think they&amp;#x27;re moreso allowing moneyed interests and plutocracy to have lobbying and backdoor dealings, they can easily ignore the public square most of the time.&lt;p&gt;This is definitely part of the picture. To add to this, I&amp;#x27;ll refer to Manufacturing Consent by Noam Chomsky. &amp;quot;Propaganda&amp;quot; does still exist in modern &amp;quot;free societies,&amp;quot; but it isn&amp;#x27;t overt like a 20th-century dictatorship would have been. Subtle manipulation of corporate media by monied interests to sway public opinion, combined with lobbying and corporate capture of government institutions, is more than enough to maintain the hegemony of certain narratives and power structures. I find it fascinating, and unsettling, to learn about.&lt;p&gt;So in a nutshell, controlling information and mainstream media narratives &lt;i&gt;is&lt;/i&gt; important for the modern ruling class, but it&amp;#x27;s much more subtle than overt censorship like a dictatorship would have. Which, in my view, makes it much more advanced and insidious.</text></comment>
<story><title>I resigned from Twitter</title><url>https://twitter.com/jack/status/1465347002426867720</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Dumblydorr</author><text>Has mediating access to information been the defining tool of control for civilizations? Maybe in tyrannical, despotic societies that is true, but those don&amp;#x27;t allow Twitter today via firewalls, so that&amp;#x27;s mostly a moot point in this thread.&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;d say the sword and the coin have both been far more controlling than limited information spread.&lt;p&gt;What of free society? Is the government of the USA, UK, or other &amp;quot;enlightened&amp;quot; societies throughout history relying upon censorship and denial of information? I think they&amp;#x27;re moreso allowing moneyed interests and plutocracy to have lobbying and backdoor dealings, they can easily ignore the public square most of the time. I just don&amp;#x27;t see Twitter piercing the armor of entrenched interests that well.&lt;p&gt;In contrast, I do see it degrading and toxifying democratic discourse, making us less resilient and more divided. That&amp;#x27;s anti-thetical to a free society in my view.</text></item><item><author>mjamil</author><text>I&amp;#x27;m in a post-Thanksgiving charitable mood, so thank you, Jack. The execution hasn&amp;#x27;t been perfect (as has been commented on ad nauseam), but Twitter is the closest to a worldwide-accessible [1] Speaker&amp;#x27;s Corner [2] I know of, and that - despite all the completely valid criticism - is a valuable public service: mediating access to information has been the defining tool of control for those in power pretty much since civilization began, and I, for one, will always pick an imperfectly moderated cesspool over the prior status quo where a church or a government told me what&amp;#x27;s true and what to think. FWIW, you&amp;#x27;ve also championed transparency and decentralization for your platform more than any other SV social media titan [3].&lt;p&gt;[1] If you have access to the Internet, that is.
[2] &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&amp;#x2F;wiki&amp;#x2F;Speakers%27_Corner&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&amp;#x2F;wiki&amp;#x2F;Speakers%27_Corner&lt;/a&gt; 
[3] &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;twitter.com&amp;#x2F;jack&amp;#x2F;status&amp;#x2F;1204766078468911106&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;twitter.com&amp;#x2F;jack&amp;#x2F;status&amp;#x2F;1204766078468911106&lt;/a&gt;</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>mjamil</author><text>I disagree that &amp;quot;enlightened&amp;quot; societies don&amp;#x27;t rely on mediating access to information as the defining tool of control; our difference of opinion is perhaps that you think of this purely as limiting information spread, where I think of it also as shaping the information for their own ends. The governments of the UK and the USA, to state two examples you mentioned, have used these tools effectively as propaganda channels repeatedly to sell their vision of armed conflict. The second Iraq war wasn&amp;#x27;t that long ago.&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;ll make a tangentially related argument: Starting with the printing press, and through the advent of telephone, radio, television, and now the Internet (mainly via the Web), controlling messaging via these media (or controlling these media directly at times) has been as much a tool of control for those in power in democratic societies as in autocratic ones.</text></comment>