Conservatives, Libertarians, Moderates and even some who at one point would have been classified as left of center have been in an abusive relationship with Big Tech for quite some time. We watch as they utilize an ever-shifting set of rules to suspend, throttle, shadowban and with increasingly greater frequency permanently ban us from their platforms. They get caught and called out for their naked hypocrisy and are then in front of Congress where they whisper sweet nothings in our ears and promise that they will do better. While the censorship may get better for a time, it always devolves back into the same behavior the moment that they think no one is watching and we find ourselves worse off than before.
If it has not become abundantly clear over the past month, Congress has no intention of acting. Republicans had plenty of time during the 1st two years of the Trump administration to take steps to address this issue. Instead, Rinos squandered that time achieving very little. No, the time has come for us as Conservatives to act. It is time to divorce Big Tech and make a conscious choice to uncouple our lives from their fascistic tendencies. While I have never been much of a boycott person, I believe it is time for Conservatives to steal a page out of the Left’s playbook and create a BDS (Boycott, Divest & Sanction) movement of our own.
I had no idea on how to begin the conscious uncoupling process so I am borrowing Dr. Gina Senarighi’s five steps from her blog “Hey Gina”.
Step 1: Find Emotional Freedom – Let’s face it… Joe Biden is being inaugurated under suspicious circumstances, the GOP fumbled the ball in the GOP Senate GA runoffs, Conservative voices are being permanently banned from social media left and right and we are having to endure a second sham impeachment. This is pretty bleak if we allow ourselves to dwell on this. We still have plenty to be positive about. We picked up seats in Congress, picked up house delegations and saw the party expand in the last election. We cannot allow ourselves to be controlled by a defeatist attitude. I have never quit at anything and I am certainly not going to start when the most important things are on the line. Pick yourselves up, dust yourselves off and begin planning how we slow the current administration for two years. I for one believe that this begins by curtailing the power of Big Tech.
Step 2: Reclaim Your Power and Your Life – 74 Million people voted for Donald Trump. Ask yourself what would happen if those 74 Million people all began cutting Big Tech out of their lives in noticeable ways? You don’t think we can make a difference? Ask Fox News. Big Tech loves to give us their technology for free. It is like the little kid from the old Dare ads where they give you the first hit for free. Except those services are not free, they come with strings. These companies can afford to give us their products for free because they are collecting and selling our data and making money off ad revenue. What happens when a significant number of users stop using their products… they lose ad revenue and have less data to sell.
Even if every person that voted for Trump suddenly stopped using Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Google and Amazon these companies would survive. They all would take noticeable hits to their bottom lines, but more importantly they would lose their power to influence and shape our discussions and thoughts. In the early years of YouTube, it was the Conservative content creators that built YouTube to prominence. Those creators encouraged debate and free thinking and it brought people across the ideological spectrum in to either support or dissent. How long to these companies maintain their prominence when they are merely wastelands of angry Leftists looking for their next outrage de jour to cancel each other?
Step 3: Break the Pattern, Heal Your Heart – We need to start examining the way in which we use Big Tech in our daily lives and look for opportunities to remove them. Understandably we cannot do everyone of the items I list below, but start with a couple and look for more ways to incorporate others into your daily habits and routines.
- Phase out Twitter and Facebook – Today will be the last day that I post, like or retweet anything on Twitter. I will probably monitor Twitter for a couple more weeks during this phase out period before I deactivate, but honestly it has been kind of boring after the latest round of bans that they may have done me a favor. Facebook I rarely use as it is, but I will be phasing it out as well. I will probably be around for a couple more months to keep in contact with family, but will be working on retraining the family to contact me directly via text or call me instead of pinging me there.
- Diversify your social media usage – How many people spent years building a Twitter or YouTube following only to watch all that hard work get flushed down the drain with a capricious violation that led to a permanent ban? Yes, it is a pain to build and cultivate multiple social media accounts, but that is the new reality. Join Gab, Locals, CloutHub and Parler when it is back up. Support these competitive companies. I do not believe that these places will become echo chambers as we have a wide spectrum of views under our tent and I believe moderate Democrats would ultimately join us on these platforms once they get tired of being harangued by the angry leftists.
- Get off Google – Just stop. Seriously use DuckDuckGo or any other search engine. I actually added Google to my parental block list as the habit of going there was so deeply engrained.
- Get off Mozilla, IE, Edge, Chrome and Safari. There are a few alternatives out there, but my personal favorite is Dissenter. It is actually incredibly fast, has all the same functionality and blocks ads.
- If a video you want to watch is hosted at another place other than YouTube… go there to watch it. Many content creators are posting in multiple places now. While many of these video streaming services may lack some of the polish of a YouTube, I am old enough to remember when YouTube was pretty crappy. Support these other providers. I am finding myself watch more content on Rumble than YT.
- Limit shopping at Amazon – Buy local when you can and support small businesses. Order directly from the vendor’s Website. Yeah, we might pay a bit more in shipping, but in the end helping keep those small businesses afloat is the lifeblood of our economy.
Step 4: Become a Love Alchemist – Twitter is a cesspool of hate. We need to move past hating the left or it will eat us alive and turn us into them. It really is time to become a happy warrior to look to spread our message of hope. I do not hate the left; they are to be pitied.
Step 5: Create a Happy Ever After Life – Look I am not going to kid you. This divorce is going to suck. We are the ones getting kicked out of the house to live in the crappy studio apartment. It will not remain this way. There are plenty of up-and-coming social media sites that while not the best are working hard to solve their issues. Facebook, Twitter and Google have dictated the rules of the conversation for far too long. We are not happy with their draconian approach to free speech, the government sides with them and frankly they don’t want us there anyway. If we support them, there are thousands of talented people who are ready to build alternatives to Big Tech that will be every bit as good.
I am not advocating that we quit the field of public debate, but when the opposition bans you from the stage you then have to build your own. As Conservatives we should have started a BDS movement against Big Tech a long time ago. To be fair there are some that warned us and began trying to build those alternatives with next to no support. What they saw then we all see clearly now. While we thought we could convince them that our voices are legitimate and protected by free speech they saw the accumulation of vast amounts of power in the hands of a few who could be influenced strongly by the left to do what government cannot do… silence the opposition. To those visionaries who saw this coming and tried to warn us, I apologize and say I am ready to help you fight back.
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