I'm afraid people now see it as an antiquated and outmoded perspective on free speech. His attitude was embraced by progressive people of the late 20th century.
That said, he too had to own his own platform in order to exercise his rights.
That said, he too had to own his own platform in order to exercise his rights.
Based on my observations, quite a few people on this web site use downvotes to indicate disagreement or dislike. Many of them appear to hate Trump.
Also, I assume you are completely offended by fox news,OANN etc. lack of progressive voices? I agree, conservative media should open themselves up to platform more leftwing ideas in order to ensure diversity of thought. Similarly to the conservative subreddit, which is enforcing its groupthink the same way the literal communist subreddit is.
Flynt is more akin to Snowden or Assange, or even Parler, in boldness. (not comparing content, just free speech boldness)
Just look at Wikipedia. He called Sandra Day O'Connor "a token cunt". He wore the American flag as a diaper. Hustler regularly published Chester the Molester, a comic strip, even after the author was convicted of molestation (which later got overturned).
My father had a collection of Hustler from the 70s and 80s that as a teen in the early 90s I sneakily perused; this was definitely the golden age of the magazine's anti-PC speech, with all you mentioned, as well as unveiled racism.
I agree that his non-pornographic content would be viewed with a very sensitive eye today.
Instead of being constantly on the defense here... Why do you think you have a right to someone else’s resources for your speech? What entitles you to be published by anyone else at all?
MLK and the civil rights movement didn't own their own platform.
The LGBT rights movement didn't own their own platform.
The women's rights movement didn't own their own platform.
Would you have been okay with them being swept under the rug? It's not as if people in power didn't want to.
Don't like twitter censorship, make your own twitter.
Ergo, Parler.
Oh, but, that's not "your" platform, that's built on AWS's platform. So AWS can deplatform you.
What's next, if Parler sets up in a datacenter with their own physical servers are people going to attack their colocation/transit/peers or their DNS provider or their domain registrar or their SSL certificate issuer? Is LetsEncrypt a platform?
The biggest issue IMO is that with this you're centralizing all the idiotic and dangerous opinions and putting them in a huge echo chamber where they only ever see (mostly stupid) opinions of people they agree with. It's accomplishing the some of the goal the de-platformers want (they don't want to see the dumb content) but the content is still there, just more fringe and more radical and now they can rightfully complain about suppression of their opinions.
I have yet to try one personally and might soon in spite of the price tag, i would love to be wrong but i don’t think i am.
Let's go through these.
It's basically brand new so there aren't a lot of third party apps. If you're the sort of person who loves installing the app for your Smart Toaster on your phone, you may not like this. But you get 95-99% of the value out of a phone if it can make phone calls, message people and has a web browser. Most apps are crap. They also have plans to support Android apps in the not too distant future.
The hardware is slower than similarly priced hardware. But again, does this really matter? You're not mining Bitcoin or rendering feature length motion pictures on your phone, are you?
Which leaves the price. It's high because they're still not making them in huge volumes. It means the early adopters will be people with money. But that's good; people with money attract developers etc. And once the volumes are higher the price will come down.
But this is all kind of chicken and egg. It's not impossible but it's hard and they may or may not succeed. If your point is that isn't already viable for everyone, that's certainly true.
My concern is less apple banning things and far more when apple and google operate in lockstep.
there is a fundamental misunderstanding in the app store review world, it was highlighted when google banned element(??) the matrix client. will apple ban IRC clients because they can connect to bad servers with universally objectionable content? will they ban SSH clients because they can be used to hack?
With the last big ban controversy (fortnight) I was firmly in the pro walled garden camp, but, now i’m no longer seeing where the big duopoly draws the line and i don’t like it.
If my grocer is a jerk, I can go to a different grocery store. If this mechanic is always giving me dubious advice I can find a different one. Modern businesses, at internet scale, really aren't that way though. They are much more "winner take all". Maybe there are one or two winners, but when they win they really do take almost all the market share. And for most of the developed world simultaneously.
I can kind of get my own phone. Someone else in this thread mentions Purism. I could also get a rooted Android phone and install a version of Android that takes out Google. What I can't do, effectively, is make my own app, if the duopoly would prefer I not. I could put my app in a private app store or offer it to the kinds of people who use Librem phones, but the market there is too small to run a successful business. Google (via Android) and Apple are effectively both a monopoly, they sell/control almost all of the phones, and a monopsony, they control almost all of the supply of phone users.
There's absolutely nothing standing in the way of PornHub introducing a phone, because they want to adult apps to be allowed.
Want to sell adult content on Instagram, but you're not allowed? Go build onlyfans.com.
I don't think that's the point. They want to feel the warm satisfaction of righteous fury and enemy defeated.
In your last line you almost prove the opposite of your point. Yes, people in power didn't want to, and yet - despite not having unfettered access to the platforms of the day - they were not swept under the rug. My view is that's because they had a critical mass of people that cared enough that they literally couldn't be swept under any rug.
Yes, they largely either did or relied on convincing platform owners, not relying on platform entitlement. Now, they and the allies they convinced didn't own a single centralized platform, it was a decentralized network with big nodes like Rev. Dr. King’s Ebenezer Baptist Church, and small nodes like the individual members of the movement, which relied substantially on person-to-person face-to-face grassroots mobilization.
And they didn’t demand publication by others’ platforms either. They demonstrated in public spaces, often at great personal risk because they didn’t have equal access to public spaces.
Edit: sibling comment said even better, yes they did own their own platforms.
> Would you have been okay with them being swept under the rug? It's not as if people in power didn't want to.
Maybe you should stop “they”ing me. I’m not other than the groups that you’re using for your point. I’m directly a part of all of the movements you mention, either directly affected or in solidarity. And while you’re at it stop with the past tense.
In none of these cases did any movement demand to be published by someone else’s platform. All have tried to gain recognition sometimes seeking publication. But none have such entitlement to expect to be in someone else’s mouth against their will.
Maybe they weren't handed a platform on a plate, like we are today, but that is entirely the point: I think they did have their own publications and financed their own media. That's how they became a movement in the first place. You can't get mass acceptance at scale from your target demographic without building a platform.
I think the examples you gave are of people who struck out to build their own platforms, and did so successfully. This is why we even know about them in the first place, thankfully.
This is oversimplification.
There’s quite a difference between “not liking” and ruining career, denial of access to services etc.
Part of the problem is that only small group of people really “don’t like it” but capable of cancelling, and vast majority of people are happy to just ban that person in their feed and go on with their life (and large number of people are actually open to opposing views).
Flynt faced "organized canceling" from many groups. They just couldn't (continue to) use their influence in the government to punish him. He's in a wheelchair because of a failed "permanent cancellation" attempt.
Also, Democrats of the era didn't much liked him either. Could you imagine 90s-era Hillary Clinton ranting against language in rap music while simultaneously supporting this guy?