Most people’s understanding of digital media is straightforward. You turn on your device, your smart phone or pc, and it’s there. Almost invariably, that now also includes a dedicated app on that device to run the media source that you subscribe to, so we add a step just to download that app from the Apple Store or the Google Play Store. Bingo, done. Web based content is separate from the mechanics of the delivery system. When it comes to hard edged news, that’s historically the purview of editors, power brokers, and politicians, except that it isn’t just that anymore. In 2020, it’s the year when the masses started to learn just how much the ‘mechanical’ layer of the Internet plays in what news is delivered to your ‘door’, your device. This is the new frontier in the battle for your mind.
The term mechanical is just an understandable analogy to differentiate all of the hardware and software that makes the Internet possible as compared to the messages that flows though that channel. The mechanics are in fact almost entirely digital, electronic, and ‘logical’. In 2020, we learned the extent that social media giants, Facebook, Twitter, etc, can filter or stigmatize what you as an end user can post on their apps for the entire world to see or not see. Even beyond the Big Tech social media lords that claim a false neutrality and the pretense to your open and impartial participation on their platforms, the open World Wide Web, (WWW) is no longer truly open either.
This site, Northeast Reader is not associated with any private 3rd party platform like a Facebook. If you know the URL, anyone on the globe except those nations with semi-closed routing partitions like China and Iran, can pull up Northeast Reader on their device and read my remarks, totally unfiltered and uncensored, but that assumes you know the exact URL, maybe because someone sent you the link. If you don’t know it, you and everyone else is at the mercy of Google to locate it among the billions of other web addresses in the digital-sphere. Northeast Reader, that’s me, posts a lot of conservative stuff. The software engineers that program the search engine GOOGLE, can rank it according to underlying technical merits (fair, historically what they did), or they – the robots that they themselves programmed, can tag it as objectionable and send it to the back of the line where no one would ever find it. I and Northeast Reader are a micro enterprise at this point and even though I feel the quality of my essays are outstanding, I’m under no illusions that it would compete against any big, medium, or even small professional players….little skin off my chin. But how will Google treat my bigger ‘cousins’?
2020 is THE watershed year for what may be the biggest transformation in digital media since social media was invented in the 2000s; we’re about to experience a generational shift. Prior to 2020, the average Joe was not fully aware of the extent that Big Tech filtered their web news feeds in and out of social media. (Broadcast media has been dramatically bifurcated for many years.) As the 2020 campaign wore on, it became obvious and newsworthy, the extent that Big Tech was interfering, but what to do about it? Conservatives were late to understand the scope of this inequity but as Big Tech gradually corrupted a Presidential election race that was a slam dunk in the first quarter, Covid notwithstanding, that understanding came too late.
Three months ago, the fight for digital media was hardly even a contest, suddenly now there are two horses – two sides in the race. With the emergence of Parler, Bongino Report, Revolver, Newsmax, et al, these platforms have eclipsed out of niche followings and into something resembling real competition, so much so as to draw ire from the likes of CNN and Bill Gates. We’ll call this new iteration, Conservative Digital Media 2.0. It’s real, it’s on the ground and it’s being widely disseminated to conservatives. Within the next six months, that race will start to look like a scene out of the old Ben Hur chariot scene, when the dirty tricks really come out. That will be the beginning of Conservative Digital Media 3.0.
Presently, the CNNs and Bill Gates’ of the progressive world are simply name calling: “crazies”, “conspiricy theories”; what-evs. The real war will be legal, liability, and that ‘mechanical’ level I originally spoke of. The ‘Section 230’ battle is heating up, the one that protects the socials from liability. Monetizing or demonetizing conservative media has already been a factor in censorship and this will only heat up even more. Google too is a ground zero for dominance on the open web. Up to the present, Google has had it’s way, slowing choking conservative web traffic. But with the emergence of ubiquitous conservative digital media, Google suddenly becomes less of a necessity. I predict a conservative win on Conservative Digital Media 3.0, which means we’ll be advancing to a 4.0.
Conservative Digital Media 4.0 will involve two points on progressive intervention, both of which entails throwing down the gauntlet of open warfare, even their admitting the practice of institutional censorship: First, there will be a lot more conservative app blocking on Apple and Android platforms. This presently has no conservative answer. Second, open manipulation of web traffic at the domain name server level. I cannot elaborate on the mechanics of how this will happen but can only point to places such as China and Iran that has successfully altered and constricted web traffic from within their own borders. I’ll only say that if conservative media does indeed win the 3.0 war, the gods at Google, Apple, and others, will move on to full bore 4.0 tactics. For this, conservatism needs to be developing an answer now, because it’ll likely take at least 5 years to answer that challenge. In an earlier essay, I suggested that conservatives do not need is more pundits. We need coders more than anything else.