The D4 lecture series, Democratic Defense Against Disinformation and Democracy, 2017.
When they started plotting how to exploit platforms' reliance on advertiser income to get them to censor political movements, to get platforms to censor opposition political movements to basically Washington Uniparty political parties around the world. This was again after they lost the Philippines election, the Brexit Referendum, and the Trump election. And they're sitting there . . . this is why I use the term "censorship industry," it was supposed to be the inverse of what they refer to as the fake news industry or the . . . they came up with this idea that if you want to kill opposition political parties who oppose the foreign policy establishment, it's too late to try to censor them at the story level; you have to censor them at the institution level and the way to do that is to bankrupt them, and the way to bankrupt them is to kill their ability to monetize eyeballs. Because the whole thing was they were afraid that MSM, which is backdoors with intelligence and the Defense sector was getting overtaken by new media, social media, and they were able to have this business model to compete with them because they were getting all these eyeballs, and eyeballs can be advertised through ads. So they came up with a plan to kill the ads. From the early, early outset of the censorship industry, it was all custom-made to kill ads. And here we are in 2023, I talk a lot about "the great man theory of history" and how I used to think that history was about systems and incentives, the complex tapestry of how a whole society is organized. Frankly, at the end of the day, a lot of it is just one great man doing a great thing that another person wouldn't have done, and it upsets the whole apple cart of all your incentives, all your pretty little incentives, carrots, and sticks and structures they go all out the window because one person had balls of steel. I'm looking at this quote from Elon as like everything they've lined up over the past years, the whole society, the censorship industry model, government agencies, the private sector mercenaries firms, the civil society ad-killing institutions, the pumped-up media allies, the fact-checking orgs, all of them, the confederacy of dunces, all in alignment, that's when you know that a genius has appeared, right? To have all that pressure and for him to just say "Go f*** yourself," frankly, if I was an ad-boycotting advertising company and the boot heel was off my neck from Media Matters or the ADL, or the Pentagon or the State Dept. and I could come up for air to think clearly for a second, I would respect the hell out of someone who told me, "Go f*** yourself" in that situation because it's really the most honest form of saying, "this is the value that we provide." Take it or leave it. And the challenge now is for X to build itself into a state of independence, which is why I propose that freedom-loving state governments actually be providing premium state government services for government agencies. I think that the X marketplace once the e-commerce is linked up to help people buy and sell goods over the internet but to do it over the X platform and take their little cut; anything that can be done to wean off ads because the ads are attached to the whole chamber of commerce set which is attached to the foreign policy blob. It feels like a historic day just to have Elon's statement on record. You can't blackmail; it's not going to work. This one instance on this one day, principle triumphs over profit.
