The rallying cry of the totalitarian is "He farted first", but if both systems have produced similar outcomes, is there much of a difference? Inspired by a recent article in the Atlantic, in today's wide-ranging discussion the hosts of Let's Talk Bitcoin! dig deeply into the questions of censorship, propaganda and how things are both better and worse than in years past.

The episode is sponsored by eToro.com and The Internet of Money Vol. 3

Shownotes:

• Who are they censoring from and how do we unpack this manipulation?
• The rallying cry of the totalitarian is always “He farted first”
• Who gets to decide what is censored?
• The squeaky wheel of child pornography gets the attention, the much more insidious problem of silencing certain voices, or giving preference to other voices.
• Propaganda goes hand-in-hand with censorship
• Propaganda is harder to detect ‘reverse censorship’
• Private platform curation have the right to moderate which can be interpreted as censorship.
• You have to choose if you’re a publisher or a platform
• What if AT&T listened to your phone calls, sold ads against them and disconnected you whenever you say something that would trouble sponsors?
• Common carriers vs. publishers
• FOSTA, SESTA and turning platforms into publishers
• Crony capitalism will always co-opt government
• The only way to win is not to play
• The only way to not be coopted as a protocol is to have it not be owned by anyone.
• It may be impossible to be a platform if you’re not a protocol
• Information overload and compartmentalization
• Are the solutions that are being proposed the solution that we need to solve this problem?
• What kind of side effects does the solution have?
• It’s one thing to say “there are idiots out there who have not developed critical thinking and are easily swayed and we need to fix this” and a whole other thing to say “And that’s why only the landed gentry should vote”
• Do tech companies think they’re helping?
• Benevolent fascism is still fascism
• The public school system was never meant for the average person to be able to form their own opinion, “it is for factory men not philosophers”
• Manufacturing consent with the power to control, censor, frame, set up the base assumptions of belief and then seek to nail them down.
• A dictatorship of the mind is far more effective than a dictatorship of violence.
• If Let’s Talk Bitcoin! Were on Youtube, we wouldn’t be able to say the word Covid-19. Avoiding totalitarian controls means missing opportunities presented by big would-be platforms.
• Government surveillance vs. private surveillance provided to the government
• What we learned from Edward Snowden
• Does China commercialize surveillance?
• And a lot more (Only room for 4,000 Characters on Anchor.fm, see https://www.coindesk.com/we-need-30-different-words-for-censorship-feat-andreas-m-antonopoulos for full shownotes)

Credits

This episode of Let's Talk Bitcoin features Stephanie Murphy, Jonathan Mohan, Andreas M. Antonopoulos and Adam B. Levine. Music provided by Jared Rubens and Gurty Beats, with editing by Jonas.

Photo by Sebastiaan Stam on Unsplash