Monday, April 4, 2016

The Internet interprets censorship as damage and routes around it

Some of you may have heard about the brouhaha over the weekend from Lamdbaconf, a conference on technical computing (a lot on LISP, for those who care).  A talk on the Orbit computer language came under attack from a bunch of Internet Fascists (commonly called "Social Justice Warriors" or "SJWs") because while they don't care about Orbit or Lambdaconf or even computer programming, they know who they hate and will walk a mile to see that anything from those they don't like is silenced.

"I did not read Pasternak, but I condemn him."

They got some of Lambdaconf's sponsors to pull out of the conference.  But then the tech community rallied to defend, well, what makes the tech community great:
So far, so wearily familiar – Marxist thugs versus free expression, with free expression’s chances not looking so hot. But there’s where the story gets good. Meredith Patterson and her friends at the blog Status 451 organized a counterpunch. They launched an IndieGoGo campaign Save LambdaConf …and an open society.
I got wind of this a bit less than two days ago and posted to G+ asking all 20K of my followers to chip in, something I’ve never done before. Because, like Merry, I understand that this wasn’t actually about Mencius Moldbug at all – it was about opposing a power play by the political-correctness police. The IndieGoGo campaign was our chance to strike back for liberty.
A day later it was fully funded. ClarkHat’s victory lap makes great reading.
The Internet interprets censorship as damage and routes around it.

Bootnote: Urbit is pretty strange, but very interesting and very subversive.  The fact that the SJWs don't understand that it's much more subversive than anything they advocate tells you haw smart they are.  Or how dishonest they are - some likely are smart enough to understand and don't like the idea of tools that would let someone sidestep their grotesque fascist thought control.

Bootnote 2: Yarvin (who used to post under the nom de blog Mencius Moldbug) is also pretty strange and (intellectually) pretty subversive.  My suspicion is that the SJWs don't want subversive ideas floating around now that they think they're in control and want to impost their grotesque fascist thought control on everyone.

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