You’re not entirely safe from any of these monsters. Each political philosophy, inevitably, produces its own rationale for imposing its will on people and crushing dissent. Consider the prominent websites currently threatened by several different political philosophies, each claiming to be morally superior to the others.
Conservatives, for instance, are right to ask the populace to show high moral standards and to protect children, but they too often turn to big government to get the job done—despite ostensibly disliking government and putting great stock in the capacity of the culture itself to mold people. So it is that Texas now threatens legal action against the site Pornhub unless the site introduces a potentially cumbersome system to verify the ages of users, something the site owners claim would more efficiently be done on the user end, that is, in the homes of responsible parents.
If you don’t want the government to raise your kids, well, don’t ask the government to raise your kids. Definitely don’t ask all your neighbors, even ones without kids, to do your dirty work for you. For now, Pornhub is retaliating by simply cutting off its services to known Texas-based computer addresses. The likely result of Texas’s ham-fisted exercise in virtue-through-government—and of Pornhub’s own geographically sweeping but technologically imprecise response—will be a lot of users lusting after VPNs, systems that obfuscate computer users’ geographic locations.
But don’t bother fleeing north to Minnesota in search of tech freedom if you leave Texas in a huff. Or at least, don’t plan on fleeing via Uber or Lyft if you’re passing through Minneapolis, where liberals, every bit as authoritarian as the conservatives to the south but with different targets for their authoritarian impulses, plan to legislate a minimum wage for Uber and Lyft drivers, one that will inevitably drive up Uber and Lyft prices, leading to fewer customers and some Uber and Lyft drivers probably having no jobs at all instead of magically-more-lucrative ones.
You can drive as far as you like but cannot escape the law of supply and demand. Government doesn’t have the power to decree new values for services and new prices for goods without offsetting shortages or increases any more than it has the power to dictate new answers to basic math equations—and it has no business trying. If Minneapolis pulls enough economically-ignorant stunts like this, it may eventually have no business period.
Meanwhile, it’s ironic that the new crop of populist conservatives such as Donald Trump are often the most vocal foes of China, since their attack on the popular social media site TikTok ends up replicating the kind of top-down industrial planning that makes China backward in wealth production and free speech no matter its gains in recent decades. Perhaps the Trumpers running Truth Social should consider changing its name to Truth Anti-Social.
Trump himself, whatever his motives, has uncharacteristically advised keeping the U.S. government’s hands off TikTok, but many of his fans, understandably worried about the Chinese site’s capacity for spying and data-harvesting of its millions of young users, are not showing as much restraint. In their zeal to ward off a foreign rival, they may end up handing the U.S. government immense new power to squelch many sites deemed subversive or unhealthy for youth—the sort of vague charges often levied by the Chinese government itself against social influences it regards as corrosive to order or undermining of the state.
We gain little advantage against foreign authoritarians if we become authoritarian ourselves, though more and more in recent years, especially among the young, right-wingers fail to grasp that argument and instead think as long as “we strike first” we’re winning, like a man who preemptively burns his own house down to thwart an arsonist.
The fact that Trump crony—his former treasury secretary and fellow New Yorker—Steven Mnuchin might end up putting together a group of American investors to buy TikTok if it’s forbidden to continue operating here under Chinese partly-governmental ownership is the perfect icing on the stupid-populist cake: ostensibly warding off China by becoming the kind of country where cronies of government leadership end up owning businesses in order to avoid regulatory hurdles. It’s like we’re already living in Beijing.
I don’t deny countless bad ideas get spread on TikTok even when you thwart the spyware, by the way, but bad ideas must be combated with other ideas, not with repressive laws, or else we have already surrendered the liberty we claim to protect, whether the rationale for the regulations sounds like Stalin or like J.D. Vance.
The libertarian option—keeping decisions about site maintenance and rules in the hands of site owners and customers—is surely the least-dangerous option, but I will not pretend that route carries no perils of its own.
The “great man” version of maverick-loving capitalism that has lately thrust people such as Elon Musk (owner of X) into the important role of protecting online speech can lead to freedom-seeking users and speakers unwittingly putting themselves at the mercy of the great man/site owner’s almost monarchical whims—like nervous Enlightenment-era philosophers having to keep their fingers crossed hoping Frederick the Great would remain interested in allowing free-wheeling philosophical discourse (compared to other monarchs of the day).
Musk doesn’t have to do anything with his site he doesn’t want to, so long as he’s honest with users about it, but it approaches a deceitful change in policy when the man who complained so often about the old, pre-X Twitter regime being free-speech-averse plays favorites and does things like abruptly cancel Don Lemon’s newly-launched show on the site. Lemon understandably mocked Musk as a hypocrite in response.
It’s sad if Musk is becoming the autocratic destroyer of a de facto speech-commons that the left feared he would when he bought the site and they fled in droves. (Let’s hope not too many tried fleeing in electric vehicles like Musk’s Teslas, either, since that market looks like it might end up as enfeebled as the Minneapolis Uber and Lyft economy.)
On the other hand, if you flee or have already fled X, don’t join the left-liberal herd in pretending the old pre-Musk Twitter was swell and free, with not only its inscrutable self-censorship but its constant caving, we now know, to the FBI and Biden administration’s requests to downrank and punish certain users. Surely that was even farther from the free-market-of-ideas ideal than the current Musk-run whimocracy.
None of the above implies that we should eschew all political principles and philosophies to avoid their extremes and instead just “make it up as we go along,” by the way. Timeless principles, not contingent convenience, should guide us. That’s precisely how innocent users know what they can do and what they’re getting into. If we eschew publicly-known, clear rules, we will ourselves end up acting as impetuous autocrats or panicked, mob-like victims of a sudden zombie attack. That’s no way to live.
Nor is a site (be it for nudes, dances, words, or cabs) necessarily safe and free if we just mindlessly leave it all to the tech experts themselves. They often want to enslave us as well—and more stealthily. We’re surrounded by would-be tyrants, really, but admitting it is the first step toward mounting a perpetual resistance.
—Todd Seavey is the author of Libertarianism for Beginners and is on X at @ToddSeavey