Kiwifarms and the Ongoing Trajectory of Internet Censorship
Joshua Moon is the world’s most butthurt liberal.
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As someone who has, by now, written I think multiple thinkpieces on cancel culture, I quite openly despise both cultures that normalise internet harassment and the self-righteousness that invariably accrues to those cultures over time as they get better at rationalising themselves. The highest point of “achievement” for this culture — hopefully for all time — is Kiwifarms. Like basically literally every trans person, as well as the mountains and the heavens themselves, I am celebrating kiwifarms’ destruction as a W with zero caveats, despite the “valid criticisms” of the left grifters. My opposition to cancel culture isn’t because I oppose the political agenda of this that or the other guy, but because internet harassment of powerless individuals is the product of a genuinely diseased worldview in which world history stops and starts to the drum of random peoples’ opinions or some other aspect of their self-presentation. By using the internet to harass individuals to within an inch of their lives, internet bullies hope that they’ll be able to accomplish the otherwise sympathetic goal of savimg the country or preventing moral degeneration or some such thing. They are the moral degeneration, whatever brand of intellectually and morally impoverished bourgeois ephemera they’re trying to bully people into parroting, “left” or “right”. Whatever insane coalitions they’ve formed with other insane internet basement people, they can’t do the thing they pretend they’re trying to do.
Unfortunately, I myself have had some traffic from kiwifarms. I got about 200 hits from them for my post on Andrew Hussie’s union-busting. One of them even commented somewhere on one of my things at one point being like I’m from kiwifarms, I know, I know, hold your applause… It was a tragic naïveté, spoken by someone who seemed to genuinely think there’s a trans person living or dead who would touch them except in preferably-lethal self-defence. If there is, I don’t know that trans person. Kiwifarms existing has always been in the top three or so reasons why I self-censor online. While the rest of my reasons are fairly specific to me, Kiwifarms is a nigh-universal censorship mechanism bearing down on pretty much everybody, and in particular all trans people, and so their demise is a victory for me in common with all trans people. Although a kiwifarmer responding to me brought disgust, it brought no fear mostly because I knew about the eventuality that it would happen, and have self-censored for years in preparation for it. Don’t worry officer, got the books right here.
In a bizarre rant, though, site founder Joshua Moon tried to turn that one around, which like, okay, we can talk about that one, because I constantly hear left grifters say this same kind of thing.
And what this machine will not accept is compromise. If I censored specific kinds of behavior, it would not matter. They don’t want a specific thing censored. They want the average person to be able to speak in channels where only specific thoughts are acceptable.
More importantly, they want to make it so that no small organization can host a service which threatens the cathedral. It used to be that one guy with a good idea could open a platform and be a Tom Anderson, Mark Zuckerberg, Tom Fulp, Christopher Poole, or Richard Kyanka. Take note these names are all from 10+ years ago. There are no new groundbreakers online anymore because breaking ground in the new Internet’s corporate parking lot is not allowed.
Site founder Joshua “null” Moon has no special esoteric insight which has allowed him to make these barely coherent, self-contradictory observations on internet censorship. The reason no One Man With An Idea can “open a platform” and “break ground” isn’t because the Je-I mean “the cathedral” decided that it hates men with ideas now but precisely because those “men with ideas” have monopolised available communication infrastructure because those ideas were to target a userbase of people who mostly don’t use the internet otherwise, competing not with kiddie pool old web stuff like GameFAQs and Something Awful, but with CNN and the Washington Post. Since the internet by default usually sorts by popularity, on search engines and stuff that are directly created to increase the rate of monopolisation, there’s absolutely no way for anything to really come up. The average internet user is much less technically literate than they were 10+ years ago, leaving us further disarmed, however, we can’t really technically engineer our way out of an economic and political problem like this, and the major achievement of people like Zuckerberg and Anderson isn’t that they made good websites for people to use, but that that they engineered new ways to profit from engagement. They weren’t men with good ideas, just men with profitable ideas. If the internet of yore was an anarchic swamp, Zuckerberg destroyed it for a mine and that was his great innovation. Lumping people like Lowtax and Moot and implicitly himself in there is just supremely goofy self-mythologisation; the same kind of Great Man stuff people like him lap up at face value, which is why he doesn’t fill his pantheon with the founders of younger platforms like Tumblr, Tik Tok, Snapchat, Tinder, Grindr, etc, because they don’t really bother to manufacture myths like that for themselves anymore, because we no longer live in the rust belt in nineteen aught five and he’s big mad about it.
Anyway, regardless of why or how, it is a fact that the internet is becoming more and more an over-sanitised, corporate shitshow with more in common with an office cubicle or the check-out line at a particularly nondescript Wal-Mart location than the place where we used to go as kids to lie about finding the Triforce or fuck around unwisely with occult techniques or whatever. Everyone knows this, and Moon here made an absolutely pathetic attempt to capitalise on that. The number of active web forums remaining can be generously estimated in the double digits, and the loss of one of them, with its emphasis on long-form discussion and archival, would be a tragedy, were it not for what that forum actually is and does, what exactly was being discussed and archived.
I don’t think nostalgia is real. Like when you think the past was better and you’re wrong about that? Hasn’t been much opportunity for that to be an issue in my lifetime.
Nostalgia pretty much showed up in the zeitgeist at exactly the point where capitalism hit its point of diminishing returns and every sphere of human life and activity started actually getting worse. Dating sucks now. Video games really are worse, and they’re breaking far less new ground with the medium just like movies, serials (can’t even call them “tv shows” anymore) and everything else. Since I was a kid, every green space in Tirana that’s big enough for a car to park on has been paved over for that reason, while the ones that are too small for that are overgrown safety hazards, so the average temperature has risen like five degrees because there’s massive heat sinks instead of trees everywhere now. The ruling class wants us to use less water, eat less food, and live in smaller, colder apartments for higher rents for shorter amounts of time. Everything is actually worse every year than the year before and “nostalgia” was invented to gaslight us on a societal level so we don’t discuss any of it in any way that anyone can actually get anything out of philosophically.
Now what the tech industry wants to think it is just this story of uninterrupted advancement. The internet now is the same thing as the internet 15 years ago, except it loads faster (not really), it’s higher definition (not really), there’s more information (ehhhh…), it’s less buggy (CSS is buggy as fuck), more “self-expression” is possible (lmao) and so we’re all big stupid for thinking it used to be better.
What’d we used to complain about back then? What did we want to be better? Not really the speed. The harassment, the ads, especially the pop-ups. We used to debate the ins and outs of forum moderation, but not really according to any theory or anything like that. We were all just guessing and there haven’t really been any advancements in that regard and now the way we relate to other people is just a lot worse anyway. Nor have the technological tools been evolved to improve moderation efficiency. The stuff we used to call “spyware” is just like a third of what the internet does by design now. That’s the technical innovation. Technology has innovated so that your pedometer can tell every corporation on earth how many times you fart in your sleep during the next lockdown and how that amount is impacted by the EU cutting your electricity at 4 in the morning and switching your diet from kebab and McDonalds to miscellaneous bug gruel. None of those are positive changes. Advertising, surveillance, and “confirming your phone number” have improved, but we hate those things.
Read: NONE of them are positive changes. “Censorship” wasn’t really ever a big concern for the average non-asshole; sure, I have a lot to say about selective moderation of political tendencies on facebook, twitter, and reddit, I know it’s deliberate that people get banned for nothing while calls for their genocide go completely unpunished even after culminating in said genocide a la Rakhine or the Indian pogroms of recent years. That is a censorship issue. But it’s not the one that I’m talking about or the one Joshua “Null” Moon is talking about. Joshua is talking about the internet harassment that women have been complaining about since like the 90's. He’s pro-that, though, making him a dumbass.
Internet censorship is something that needs to happen. It needs to be harder to orchestrate a genocide in Rakhine or a pogrom in Delhi via Facebook just like it needs to be harder to send a swat team after a moderately popular Twitch streamer. Russia is really using the internet to spread fascist propaganda and that needs to actually be taken care of. But private corporations obviously do not have the capability to do that, and developing that capability is not profitable enough to ever happen. Since platforms get money from engagement, it’s actually bad for them if people are less angry and motivated, so insofar as they do develop the capacity to really manage the obvious necessity of internet censorship, they’re not going to use it for the thing it needs to be used for, it’s just going to sanitise the democrats and ban Kashmiris for not liking Indians or whatever.
This is a necessary social function that is outsourced to Facebook and Twitter, and as long as they’re the ones developing it, internet censorship is always going to suck and not so much “be open to abuse” as have that be its primary purpose. Capitalism has had decades to come up with a solution on this and its only proposal is that we continue in resignation for a few more decades until we all die.
It’s not even really accurate to say I don’t think facebook and twitter should be in charge of this. I do actually. They’re in charge of everything, so this is their job. However it happened, that’s the status quo, so let’s leave them in charge. If we need to change that then let’s change that; no half-measures, if a decadent moribund socio-economic class is to be in charge of everything then grant it every opportunity to showcase its incompetence and unfitness. Obviously this is a problem calling for a real solution, a multi-pronged approach involving the best minds and processes in the fields of web design, user interface, social engineering, it’s going to need to involve people competent in every subject that is discussed online, and then a real inventory needs to be taken of the amounts and kinds of labour that it’s going to take to maintain the conversational climate of digital space until such a time as society is allowed to develop to a higher socialist stage and it becomes decreasingly necessary. (Obviously, this level of agitation is due to a lack of education, fulfilment, access to real hobbies, ability to start families, etc, and it can be expected to be reduced over time as socialist construction advances.)
If you think the private sector can “innovate” that solution let’s see it do so!
It’s similar in principle to urban engineering. We know what we can do as a society to reduce car dependance and the accompanying pollution of the air, sky, rivers, ocean, and urban space generally. We just won’t do that, because it’s not profitable. Trying to reduce car dependence just isn’t going to happen under capitalism, period, and neither is literally any improvement in internet social organisation. And the issue isn’t that corporations have too much power or whatever, but that they exist and all meaningful social organisational functions, online and off, are outsourced to them, and that it must all be outsourced to them for them to even exist. If we are dissatisfied with that, then let us organise a party to once and for all appropriate this and, by necessity, all, functions now held by profit-driven malignants.
In short, internet design is like urban design, in that under capitalism, it hates you.
Keffals is an unambiguous hero; doublly so for managing to achieve anything under these ridiculous circumstances. In an era of Caitlyn Jenners, Laverne Coxes, and Nina Wests, it means something to the trans community that it was one of our own who took them down.
And that is what happens when you actually donate to trans womens’ fundraisers.
Speaking of.
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