In the chaotic aftermath of the rebels storming the Capitol building, the dominos began to fall throughout the digital realm as the vendors of web hosting services began an aggressive campaign to remove what are construed by the tech overlords as extremist right domains.
The abrupt termination of support for a heavily scrutinized and ridiculed social media site began when Amazon refused to do business with controversial electronic community Parler, prompting a ripple effect rivaling a self-driving vehicle multiple vehicle collision and bringing the First Amendment to the forefront of the divisively charged conversation. As publicly traded private entities can refuse the right of service to anyone or anything, a convoluted debate emerges, as social networking platforms regardless of ideology are perceived as bastions for free speech. The notion that F***book and Twitter have made a veritable mockery of by instilling a confusing and ambiguous sinuous novel of “terms and conditions” that are even a challenge for lawyers and policy analysts to make sense of in giving the prodigious corporations latitude to banish content without explanation. In an eclectic fusion of Orwellian dogma crossed with David Copperfield, the ungodly mutant of a self-policing vaporization mechanism run by bots and influenced by humans is the perfect metaphor in illustrating the Chinese technique of population management in securing and maintaining power for the inner party and the elites.
Parler, which brands itself as the “Conservative Twitter”, ended up suing Amazon after indirectly discovering that the net cast from corporate headquarters includes an alarming majority of the available web and server hosting services readily available to the public, an unsettling conundrum that has pricked the eardrums of the federal government. Parler CEO George Farmer searched in vain for days until finally locating a firm that would sell him server space.
Currently, the Federal Trade Commission has launched a probe to investigate allegations that the Jeff Bezos-founded retail giant has created a monopoly on cloud computing services. While Parler ultimately lost the lawsuit, as a judge decided to rule in favor of free trade, the FTC’s discovery process will no doubt at least temporarily place the bureaucratic shackles on Amazon which is armed with a limitless supply of corporate legal funds and can endure the most severe sanctions the government can imagine. The probable empty gesture by the feds rivals a drop of fresh water futilely challenging the salinity of the ocean as eloquently mused by AE Houseman.
The arduous pathway endured by Farmer exemplifies the crux of the information age, as a lack of transparency from the corporate giants, combined with a dauntingly complex tapestry of mergers and partnerships in a system that avoids accountability and is designed to furtively opaque. With the F***book parent company making headlines by morphing to the curious brand name of Metaverse, and Google under the umbrella of the Alphabet, Inc. consortium, the cagey precedent has been set where forthrightness has slinked to the background like after running into an ex at a cocktail party, all in the style and anonymity of the offshore banking experience. While not at the level of the pending Bitcoin scandal, at least from the perspective of criminal prevalence, the deliberate audacity of the tech hierarchy to remain cryptic, combined with the innovative ineptitude of lawmakers, is simply painful to watch from the outside. The Silicon Valley imprint on society is basically circumventing common law, and a burgeoning paradox exists as regulators don’t know what they are seeing to combat the unknown indiscretions.
With Schrodinger’s Cat clearly out of the box in a wavering quantum state somewhere between life, death or both, trillions are being netted in an atmosphere lacking a conscience, while government takes an antiquated approach in trying to navigate the everchanging digital maze. As mainstream social media pawns itself off as a sanctuary for free speech, yet openly moderates any differing ideology to the Zuckerberg’s and Dorsey’s of tycoons playing politics, the backend warzone of commercialized censorship is just getting started and the next six months should indicate if there is any recourse to this pending crises.