Pardon the Interruption

I apologize for falling behind. I've been on vacation. I always pack the laptop, thinking I'll blog from the beach, but that doesn't ever really happen. I will try to get caught up on Contrabang! tomorrow, and get back to the usual routine.

I haven't followed current events much in the past week. The most interesting event I caught wind of was Reddit quarantining (a soft form of banning) r/the_donald - the biggest Trump forum on the internet. I've been expecting it to happen at some point before the next election, and hoping for it as well. Social media companies like Reddit are politically controlled operations. They have been converged, in the lingo of Vox Day. They were not created as political entities, but became politicized anyway. If there is one thing that should be obvious, it's that we shouldn't be building online communities that SJWs can destroy at their own leisure.

What is less obvious is whether we should be engaging in enemy territory at all. Many say we should, because the mainstream outlets are where the discourse is taking place. I notice that those people also tend to be the ones dependent on maintaining a large following for their own livelihoods. Others say that abandoning the mainstream sites amounts to surrender. If we simply leave, we are giving up even more institutions without a fight, and the whole problem is that we've allowed the left to take over the institutions nearly unimpeded. Still, I liken it to the way we face a cancer diagnosis. We'd rather the lung not have been infected to begin with, or caught and treated early. Once too far gone, though, and the only option is to remove the diseased organ. Many of our institutions are so far radicalized that they can never be treated. They must be destroyed.

Thus, I will be ending my own use of Reddit, abandoning my 11-year-old account there, as I have my 15-year-old account on Facebook. For both those platforms, I am their core audience. Facebook was built around college millennials, and Reddit's core audience is 30-something white men in the tech sector. They've grown and expanded, but still can't survive with their core audience shrinking. They will no longer be able to find actual investors and will have to rely on support from political entities. By leaving their platforms entirely, we at least help turn a political weapon that is self-sufficient into one that is a financial liability for the left. It's the best we can do, and we can focus our attention, energy, and money in better places.