The end of 2.0. The story went something like this: a small handful of brilliant young people founded a small handful of social media platforms that fundamentally transformed society. The founders of these companies were mostly engineers in the old hacker mold, information jockeys who believed passionately in the progressive benefits of technological innovation, and a free, open internet. Among several historical paradigm shifts, their platforms empowered individuals while eroding institutional gatekeeping. This tracked an old guard media class down a path of obsolescence, and made a permanent enemy of a dying industry. Meanwhile, the mostly-liberal technologists who built the social media platforms found themselves increasingly at the mercy of a small but extremely influential group of low-key literally crazy people they accidentally hired at the dawn of a new culture war. The activists were, and remain, largely obsessed with a socially regressive, quasi-populist, quasi-Marxist, faith-based evangelical ideology — absolutely left, but not at all liberal. Together, disaffected, downwardly-mobile media elites, death cult cultural authoritarians, and a hybrid of the two popularized a “techlash” that ate away at industry morale and, separately, made its way to Congress, where implicitly and explicitly the threat of antitrust legislation was made. This led directly to the top-down, systemic empowerment of old guard “fact-checkers” charged with policing activist dogma, a total mainstreaming of political censorship, and the removal of a sitting United States President from the social internet.

A tale as old as time.

The problem with freedom-oriented people is they mostly treat their antagonists with a respect and humanity they’re rarely themselves afforded, while authoritarians play to win. This means, over a long enough time horizon, authoritarians tend to win power — at least, for the few moments it takes authoritarianism to devour itself, and for its host civilization to collapse. But in the world of technology, there’s really only one rule, which somehow every generation we forget: everything changes, and the change-makers always win. As I noted a few weeks ago in The Sovereign Influencer, companies that focused on creator monetization, creator control, and any kind of alternative, cancel-proof social media this decade all generated trivial amounts of revenue by comparison to the social giants. But they were riding one of the most important trends in technology: