Collectivist Ping-Pong

[MisterSwig]

The current debate over free speech on the Internet offers us a prime example of how different strands of collectivists play ping-pong with each other. It begins with a serve of the ball. For example, companies like Twitter or Facebook or Google convince people that their social media sites are "communities." They say this in their TOS and use it to justify forming "community standards" of behavior. And when prominent people start suffering from demonetization or deplatforming because of their speech, the users send a sharp volley back to the server. They accept the notion of "social media as community," but follow the premise to its collectivist conclusion: social media is public space. This game continues back and forth until both sides settle on a compromise: an Internet Bill of Rights. Of course such a Bill of Rights is based on the false premise that social media is a community, when in reality it's only media. 

If you watch prominent Internet talk show hosts like Joe Rogan or Dave Rubin, you'll see them struggle to integrate free speech with property rights, because they still hold the collectivist principle. They see humans as primarily members of a group, instead of primarily as individuals. And so any form of media is primarily group-owned, communal property.

The concept of "community" has been thus pilfered and abused by collectivists. Its genus used to be actual people. People living together. Now it includes products. People and their online products together. This is a contradiction. And since it cannot exist, people evade the fact that they don't actually live on the Internet together. They must evade or compartmentalize this fact in order to accept "social media as community" and continue playing collectivist ping-pong. Unfortunately for us individualists, it's a game that increasingly opposes individual rights until the most skillful collectivist wins. If we can't convince them to stop playing the game, we are doomed.