John Jefferson
One of my pet peeves is to observe and chronicle how the 200-year idea of “liberal democracy” is disappearing before our very eyes due to the various new social conditions arising from technological innovations. I have written about it several times, but we have added one more data point to the idea that “free speech” as a concept is functionally dead or dying in the Euro-Atlantic. The founder of Telegram, Pavel Durov, was arrested in France on trumped-up charges that his platform “facilitated” human trafficking and pedophilic activity.
I say “trumped-up” because we have seen previous instances of actual sexual grooming and other such criminal deviance on social media platforms before (and even currently), but none of their founders have been arrested. No, the real reason is that Telegram, like X, or previously RarBG, or Pirate Bay, is committed to an old-school, mid-’90s throwback idea of zero censorship and total freedom of speech—a callback to a time when the internet was imagined to be the ultimate high-tech frontier of Utopia. That dream is dead: Durov refused the Europeans’ demands to crack his app, and is now facing the consequences.
Tucker Carlson conducted an interview with Durov a while back, and tweeted it out again following the arrest.
Pavel Durov left Russia when the government tried to control his social media company, Telegram. But in the end, it wasn’t Putin who arrested him for allowing the public to exercise free speech. It was a western country, a Biden administration ally and enthusiastic NATO member, that locked him away. Pavel Durov sits in a French jail tonight, a living warning to any platform owner who refuses to censor the truth at the behest of governments and intel agencies. Darkness is descending fast on the formerly free world.
Carlson would know. His own life is now on the line: consider that the Department of Justice has begun a broad criminal investigation into Americans who have worked with Russia’s state television networks. This is an easy way to tamp down on any dissenting voices, such as those of Carlson or Elon Musk; if carried out, the effect would be chilling. That’s the aim. The same goes for the anti-X crusade in Brazil and Europe. X is ostensibly the only platform to provide zero censorship, and thus alternative viewpoints. The Telegram arrest is just a practice run.
Consider two questions.
First, if, as the online saying goes, “America innovates, China replicates, and Europe regulates,” then what explains one side of the American political spectrum imitating European-style repression on innovation and freedom of speech? And, second, if there are people who are megarich, worth more than the annual GDP of mid-sized states, and they see huge international institutions trying to harm them, then what’s stopping them from banding together to oppose the very idea of international institutions—in short, from bringing back feudalism?
The second question is more relevant, given that, as David Sacks said, “Using allied countries to circumvent First Amendment protections is the new Rendition.”
The answers might soon look less than hypothetical. Free speech has never been the historical norm of human governmental organization. Even John Milton’s career took an unfortunate turn after writing Areopagitica, when he became the lead censor for Oliver Cromwell. Every single technological innovation that leads to freedom of expression inevitably leads to more repression and political-theological conflict. The printing press and the wars of the Reformation led to a reactionary backlash. The industrial revolution and telegraphs and rail lines led to the age of power imbalance and then imperialism. Social media and the Arab Spring led to, well, what everyone can see in the Middle East.
In short, the idea that free speech can re neutral, without power behind it, is fallacious; the power will inevitably find enemies. There’s no balance in the world unless provided by a great power. Might is still right. Europe and America are now not even nominally defending free speech and dissent against concentrated power.
Which brings us back to the next hypothetical. If there are phenomenally rich men in the West, who could quite literally buy half of some continents and create armies if they wished, what is stopping them from banding together to bring about neofeudalism? Or simply toppling some governments and taking over? What might the backlash to the backlash look like?
The answer will almost certainly be not very nice. If the cycle is from the tech revolution to a dark-age crackdown to global theological conflict to a new social and security architecture, we are perhaps at the second stage. And whatever it is that is happening in Europe is perhaps coming to America sooner than we’d like to think.
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