You can be wiped off the map
…digitally, that is.
From one day to the other Donald Trump was banned from Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Snap, Twitch, PayPal, Shopify, YouTube, Reddit, TikTok, and more.
Stop! Read that sentence again slowly:
From one day to the other Donald Trump was banned from Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Snap, Twitch, PayPal, Shopify, YouTube, Reddit, TikTok, and more.
Billions of people comprise these platforms. Billions of people around the world have witness the ousting of one man from the major digital realm, whether it’s temporary, indefinitely, or permanently. He has been disconnected, unplugged and shunned aside for his erratic, irrational, and violence inciting actions. Donald Trump has been digitally impeached.
How do I feel about this? I’ve got mixed feelings. On one hand, I’m pretty content and proud to see a man like Trump and his supremacist quasi-dictator approach being silenced and removed from the most valuable distribution platforms. On the other hand, I’m getting an unsettling Orwellian vibe from realising how the largest social conglomerates can literally wipe out a persons digital self and like a snap of a finger, their entire voice and distribution can be silenced.
Sure, Trump and others that have been or will be banned will find alternatives, workarounds, or loopholes that will allow them to continue their digital dispersion, but that does not takeaway from the fact that they will be official banned from the digital commons and banished to No Man’s Land.
My qualms with this are mainly with how easy it appears to be for these companies to eliminate your digital presence. For people without the resources of the billionaires in the world, being shut off from the digital realm would mean social obliteration. With technology’s advancement in AI, VR, Metaverse, robotics, and the integration of all these technologies into your day-to-day reality it seems quite probable that at some point your “virtual you” will actually be as valuable as your “physical you”.
If this level of power and control is given to these companies, where will that leave them against our current for of democracy, human right, and government?
Will we live in the dystopian reality portrayed by Orwell in his various books or more recently by James Barrat in his book “Our Final Invention”? Will we be prone to being shunned from virtual existence and thus be incapable of have a “normal” life thereafter?
The answers to these questions are uncertain and may pose an unsettling premonition of what’s to come… or I may be completely wrong and this we should simply be happy Trump has been silenced, ousted, and digitally suppressed.
With that thought, I bid you adieu.
FM
Here’s an interesting article on how Trump’s deplatforming went.
