Lauren Chen and Big Tech

What is capitalism? Most of us think it is simply the voluntary exchange of goods and services for either other goods and services or some kind of currency. Well, we’re all wrong. According to Lauren Chen AKA Roaming Millennial, it’s actually using government to protect Democracy.

Even as a critic of big tech (and the President supporting it, who Lauren supports) I have been an even stronger critic of allowing the government to take any control of them. Simply screaming “it’s a threat to our Democracy” (an illegitimate system or mob rule, even by Lauren’s own admission) is not a reason to allow the only monopoly organization on this planet to control Twitter.

According to Lauren, Faith Goldy being banned for saying “We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children,” or Sargon being banned for calling someone a Nigger (both of which were things that Lauren refused to specifically say) will lead to you being banned for saying taxes should be lower. How is this not a slippery slope fallacy? Make all the analogies about frogs you want (which I wouldn’t recommend making in front of your boss), you can’t change the fundamental issue at play.

But let’s say Twitter starts banning tradcons like Tucker, neocons like Kristol, and even ancaps like myself. Here’s what I’ll do: Go somewhere else. I find it hilarious that people are actually asking to be able to associate with business they don’t agree with. That’s the logic of — wait no, that’s not logic.

The claim Facebook is a monopoly is just nonsense. Anyone who has been around the block knows that. Remember this guy?

Social networks, as with many other kinds of networks, are showing a tendency towards a monopolistic market equilibrium that almost by definition makes social networking a “natural” monopoly.

The implications of this conclusion are intriguing. Setting the side speculation of government intervention, the success of MySpace has produced a bumper crop of “me too” sites backed by various venture capital firms.

Yet, economics suggests that even if the cost of having multiple networks is small, there will just a few major players in the end. Other sites will be condemned to niche markets and subsets while MySpace becomes the only site of significance similar to how eBay (another good example of a cyber network) dominates the online auction space.

Or this guy from about ten years earlier (the same year Google was lanuched in fact):

Its triumph could hardly be less likely. Yahoo! has emerged from a crowded corner of the Web, where at least three other major services help people do the same thing — find things on the Internet. Type in “Pamela Lee” or “IBM” at any of these so-called search sites, and you’ll find that the others — Infoseek, Excite, and Lycos — tell you about more Websites faster than Yahoo! does. Its technology is not nearly as robust as that of its rivals. Yet Yahoo! gets twice as many visitors as its nearest competitor.

But no social media site can compete with MySpace, no search engine can compete with Yahoo, no browser can compete with Internet Explorer, no smartphone maker can compete with Blackberry, no email service can compete with Hotmail,and no online shopping website can compete with eBay. How many of these things still exist in the form of anything other than jokes? The last time most of you heard of Hotmail was more than likely that Smosh video where they joked about it sounding like a gay porn site about two years ago.

For that matter, can I just point out the irony of arguing Facebook is a monopoly on a website that is not Facebook?

The fact is, a monopoly can not exist unless every single person who wishes to use this service is satisfied, and if that’s the case, what’s the problem? For more information, watch this video by Shane Killian.

So is Facebook a monopoly (because you, for some reason, can’t go to Twitter, Minds, Gab, and a million others)?If you tie my arms behind my back then I guess you could get me to say so, however, that’s because of government. As my friend Esoteric Entity has pointed out, Facebook is only able to make a profit because on government money. So government created the problem and Lauren thinks its government who is going to fix it? Does that even count as logic?

Let’s end with why you should be worried about the idea of regulation of the internet in any form. When you give the government a millimeter, it takes the mile. Lauren says she’s for “small government,” which is odd because no such thing exist. As the old comic tells us, when you kick out big government, small government says “I’m hungry.”

Remember when the top income tax rate was 7%? Or how about when banning automatic weapons was out of the question? The fact is, government always expands and giving it even a small amount of control of any industry might as well be admitting you think that industry should be taken over by government.

Follow my twitter