Thread to discuss the implications of public discourse being controlled by a handful of private companies in the US, and what (if any) remedies are available.
This issue concerns everyone, obviously, but has particular implications for women, given the dominance of men in tech.
Tech companies are the new seat of world power and they are overwhelmingly male. While women have been diligently working towards getting equal representation in government, men have been building a 'Brotopia' in Silicon Valley.
The term 'Brotopia', should not be regarded flippantly. It is a quite literal description of a society designed solely according to (mostly young) male preferences. Previously such men would have had to negotiate with young female preferences, the controlling hand of older men and, particularly, the wisdom of older women. Read Emily Chang's research on what happens to social norms when young (or youngish) men don't have to cleave to traditional strictures designed to curb the extremes of male behaviour:
www.vanityfair.com/news/2018/01/brotopia-silicon-valley-secretive-orgiastic-inner-sanctum
The creation of a Brotopia doesn't even have to be deliberate. It's purely a numbers game. Men gravitate to tech in much greater numbers than women, hence the priorities of tech will reflect the priorities of those men (many of whom have ASD traits). The result is that we are heading towards a society almost totally devoid of the wisdom of grandmothers. AFAIK that has never happened before in human history.
That might seem tangential to the issue of free speech on the internet, but I think it is connected, in the sense that if speech is seen to threaten men's sexual freedoms (to mimic women for pleasure, or to access the desired number and variety of women, or to sexualise children), then that speech will be shut down. As we are seeing currently, with reddit shuttering r/gendercritical while leaving up subs dedicated to documenting and eroticising rape and female sexual trauma for male pleasure.
People who say 'How can women talking critically about gender be 'hate speech', while rape pornography is not?' are missing the point. 'Hate speech' is the pretext for what is really the assertion of male sexual freedom as the supreme value: rape porn is obviously protected under such a rubric, while women talking about paraphilias and child protection is a threat, so reddit's logic is entirely consistent.
I don't discount the impact of other factors here, not least of which is the wholesale abandonment of enlightenment values on the left, and the widespread mob madness induced by social media, which seems designed to cultivate our worst instincts.
I just wonder what we are going to do about it. It feels like everything is rapidly intensifying. New and creative thinking on the part of feminists is required.