The Invisible Rebel Problem

How abandoning tech platforms might be a fatally self-inflicted wound

Libertarians, anti-authoritarians, haters of government overreach and freedom lovers alike, are abandoning (or threatening to) tech platforms - like Substack - in the wake of demands for us to submit our digital papers to protect the children from social media.

This is an understandable but shortsighted reaction.

To be a libertarian in a bureaucratic, rule-loving society, like Australia, is an ongoing battle to stay true to one’s principles while living in reality. We may think taxation is theft but we comply with tax law unless we want to incur the ire of one of our of largest bureaucratic bodies. Gun laws, anti-self defence laws (as nicely illustrated in David Leyonhjelm and David Limbrick’s pieces on self defence) infringe on our most basic right to defend ourselves. But it is a brave soul who deliberately violates these laws, as their lives will, mostly, be destroyed.

Leaving social media and blogging platforms will not cause significant or catastrophic personal consequences - you wouldn’t be violating any law of course. But in our tech driven, authoritarian society, we are in danger of losing more ground via a poorly timed retreat. If those of a freedom-loving persuasion, who counter the zeitgeist on everything from lockdowns to climate change, leave these platforms, we know who will be left. Yes, a certain number of loyal fans will follow you wherever you go, but what about the young, the not yet politically engaged, and the libertarian-curious?

Even if such people are actively looking for alternative views, they may not find them on the sites they frequent most. That could give the false impression that many of these ideas are so ‘settled’ that there is not even a cogent opposition to speak of.

Laws such as age verification for social medial are obviously pushing us toward digital IDs; Jessica Colby has written extensively on the horrors that will unleash. Substack’s willingness to add age verification, even though they were not captured on the original list of companies required to comply, shows, like many other changes in society, there will be a great deal of ‘voluntary’ agreement with digital IDs. I will not denounce Substack as I do not know what conversations took place behind the Zoom windows: companies hire teams of lawyers to avoid vulnerabilities. It is possible they saw this as a necessary, mostly low-risk move to protect their place in a growing market.

This speaks more to the anti-business nature of Australia, and the many impositions we have on freedom of association, as opposed to any latent Orwellian tendencies within Substack. We can keep wishing companies would be more like Musk vs. The eSafety Commissioner, and we should make it clear such bravery will be rewarded, but unfortunately, revolution in reality is a lot more boring.

In much the same way that the Covid response purged the emergency services and military of anyone who would not follow immoral orders and not comply, the tech world may end up a petty tyrant’s paradise - even more so.

The concerns about capitulating or appeasing one’s enemy are real. The Liberal Party has become a shell of its founding shelf because it relinquished its core principles; under the pretense of ‘modernising’, and appeased those who hate them and would never vote for them anyway. They are now politically irrelevant, an astonishing turnaround for a party which held government for so many decades. But staying, persuading, and recruiting new people online is, currently, our best course of action.

It is also imperative that we rebuild the offline world, by reinvigorating the print industry and such, to make us more robust. These days I often wonder if tech will not prove to be the greatest destroyer of freedom, disguised as its ultimate saviour (but that is a question for another day). But until then, we must stand our ground.