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It seems odd to structure a project around freedom of speech, control of your own information, and dilution of central authority, and then act disappointed when it actually gets used for those purposes. If a group that posts videos of journalist executions can use it without getting shut down, it is certainly usable for any other group that may be unpopular with their local majority: Tibetan nationalists, Falun Gong, breastfeeding moms, cop watchers, Iranian women's rights groups, Ukranian rebels, homosexuals, German Nazis, Quebec secessionists, eco-terrorists, unschoolers, conspiracy theorists, anarchists, red-state liberals, blue-state conservatives, and people who text while driving. To get the good, you have to take the bad with it. The same Bitcoin that can buy a pizza can also buy a murder. The same typewriter can write both a beautiful poem or an extortion note. A hammer can build a house or crack a skull. A fire can chase away the cold and the dark, or it can burn your home to ash. The early adopters are going to be the most blatantly offensive, and the most suspiciously paranoid, and the most idealist. The mainstream people already have their mainstream network, and won't see any reason to switch until they find themselves penalized in some way for being different from the owners of the system. This is good. If someone as nasty as a journalist beheader can't get silenced, I know with reasonable certainty that if I go to Diaspora, there's likely nothing I would ever do myself that would result in me being erased from the network. And I can share information with just my friends, rather than my friends plus all paying Facebook customers. And in addition to all that, how can you expect to get more jaw-jaw and less war-war if you slap a gag on the other guy every time you see his lips move? |